


Slipped Briskly Into An Intimacy

by ncfan



Series: Hurt/Comfort Prompts [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (of a sort), Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Do Not Archive (The Magnus Archives), Gerry experiences friendship for the first time and doesn't know how to deal with it, Gerry is Jon's celebrity crush, Gerry lives AU, Hurt/Comfort, Jon does not have a mother hen mode, Jon has an angry goose mode, Much confusion is had, Nonbinary Gerry, Other, Road Trips, The longest day ever recorded in fic, Triggers, and he's getting a little cognitive dissonance when he actually MEETS Gerry, though not a 'good things have been happening to them since' AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:20:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 51,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25971994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: Jon impulsively asks if Gerry wants to come with him, Gerry only slightly less impulsively agrees, and there they go. AU. [Prompt #7: Crying]
Relationships: Gerard Keay & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Gerard Keay/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Series: Hurt/Comfort Prompts [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1885060
Comments: 31
Kudos: 183





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> Before you ask, in case it’s just entirely too obvious… I’m not up to date on S5. I got up to the first episode focusing on the Corruption, and then I just went nope, and put it down, and couldn’t pick it back up. It’s nobody’s fault; I had ample warning for what the season was going to be like, and I thought I could handle it, but I just couldn’t. I’m an essential worker and I’ve been working all through the pandemic, and it’s put a lot of strain on me in ways that aren’t immediately obvious until I reach the point where I just can’t anymore. I’ve read some spoilers, but if I decide to finish the series, I’ll pick S5 back up when I feel ready to do it. I don’t know when that will be, but it’s probably going to be some time _after_ a vaccine has been widely-approved and widely-distributed. So, after the series has completely ended.
> 
> A note: the following trigger warnings are for the fic as a whole, not just any one chapter.
> 
> [ **CN/TW** : Internalized victim-blaming; internalized minimization of horrible things happening to someone; trauma; Jon’s unsubtle death wish; implied suicide ideation; boundary violations (neither Jon or Gerry are great with boundaries, and both of them, Gerry especially, have had way too much experience of people who don’t respect their boundaries); mentions of vomiting; oblique to semi-graphic descriptions of injury; scars; trauma, so much trauma; references to abuse; long periods without food; captivity; kidnapping; murder]
> 
> Prompt #7: Crying.

In the stale, sour air—Gerry doesn’t know why they still even notice it; all this time, and they’ve never been dragged to a hotel room that _hasn’t_ smelled like a thousand nervous fugitives have sweated out the entire water content of their bodies into it—they sit on the edge of the bed and watch the new Archivist open and close his mouth several times. He’s done that a lot since Gerry started talking. He also looks a little like the way Gerry imagines someone looking just before they get hit by a truck, and Gerry can’t tell if that’s something that comes from outside, or if it’s something their mind just spun up in the middle of the crippling boredom that’s always been woven in between dread and bitterness and longing, for all the time they’ve been stuck with Herbert and Montork—or is it Montauk? Sometimes Julia pronounces it ‘Montork’, and sometimes out of her hungry mouth, it’s ‘Montauk’ instead.

Gerry’s never seen somebody get hit by a truck. They really couldn’t tell you for sure what it’s supposed to look like. They’re just gonna have to guess, and they’re gonna guess it’s the way Jonathan Sims, or the Archivist, or _Jon_ , looks now.

Then, the Archivist, or Jonathan Sims, or just _Jon_ leans over and turns off the recorder, and Gerry feels… not sure, actually. Gerry’s gotten good at not being sure what they’re feeling, when what scratching out what they actually feel would be… yeah, it wouldn’t be great. Maybe they feel like a string’s been cut inside of them, or they feel like somebody’s told them to shut up while they were in the middle of talking, or like they’re just waiting. Gerry looks down, picks at the fraying cuff of their button-down shirt, a shirt that’s long since lost any color and just taken on the color of the smoke of a hundred different campfires they’ve sat at while waiting for Herbert and Montork-Montauk to come back with the latest… yeah. Just… waits.

They’ve said everything there is to say. Well, saying everything there is to say would take longer, a lot longer, and Gerry sometimes imagines unraveling themselves like a fraying scarf or someone taking a set of knitting needles to the fibers of their body and unspooling it until they’re sitting on the floor in a pile of stringy flesh and eyes and bones and hair. Something about it feels terrible. Something else about it feels like ecstasy, though Mum would shake her head and say _why limit yourself, Gerard? Why do you_ always _insist on limiting yourself?_

That’s probably got something to do with the fact that Gerry’s never had the nerve or the cruelty to do what they’d have to do to play all sides against the middle, and…

…and they can’t win any arguments with Mum now. They never could win any arguments with Mum. They _really_ can’t do it now.

Gerry hasn’t said every last thing there is to say, but they’ve said everything the Archivist had _wanted_ them to say, everything they know to say, anyways, kind of without meaning to, kind of meaning to say more, _really_ hoping this man who doesn’t really look like ‘stop the apocalypse’ material, who doesn’t even have the hard gleam in his eyes that Gertrude had, that hard-bright gleam that had always made her seem so much bigger than the frail, delicate gray body that once was hers, will turn out to be up to snuff before it’s too late.

(Gertrude, dead! Dead? Yes, definitely ‘dead!’. Gerry can’t decide if they’re supposed to be angry, if they’re supposed to cry, if they’re supposed to not feel anything at all. They’re feeling _something_ that is definitely not _nothing_ , but Gertrude was…

Gertrude is something Gerry doesn’t want to touch. Not now. Maybe not ever. ‘Not ever’ isn’t likely. It’s not a luxury the world has ever seen fit to afford them. ‘Never’ always becomes ‘some time.’ They already told Jon more than they really wanted to, and the _look_ on his face as Gerry explained just how it was they’d parted ways was one that made Gerry want to scratch his eyes out so he wouldn’t look at them anymore, just for a moment.

Simple story. Head trauma in a fight, suspected concussion. Gerry doesn’t have much of a choice about the hospital, because the EMTs aren’t taking no for an answer. And then, and _then_ , they go looking for a skull fracture, and what they found instead was—

And then, a phone call. And crying. And then, she hangs up. And then, she’s just gone. No need to get that weird, twisty look. Really, what was anyone expecting?)

They’ve said everything this man came looking to hear from them, everything they know to say, and—and now, he’s turned the tape recorder off. Say whatever else you like about Gerry, but they’re not stupid enough not to know what that means.

Gerry feels something shrivel inside. It’s not their heart. Their heart’s not in a state that really allows for any further shriveling. It’s just something adjacent, that’s all.

“I…”

He’d been so full of questions all the time they’d been talking, and now, at last, he falters. Maybe he’s like Gertrude, and doesn’t know how to say goodbye to people, doesn’t know how to put into words the simple ‘ _You’ve given all that you can give.’_ Huh, they should have talked to Mum; she could have given lessons, and probably wouldn’t even have charged too much for it. Jon’s got an excuse, Gerry supposes, in that he never had the vinegary pleasure of Mary Keay’s acquaintance. Gertrude’s another story. Gertrude didn’t have that excuse.

( _She told them she was my mother, why didn’t that bother me, why didn’t I realize what_ —)

Gerry looks back up, and he’s looking right at them. Brown eyes owlish behind thick glasses that Herbert and Mon— _Julia_ were kind enough not to break when they grabbed him. That’s kinder than usual for them, and there’s a part of Gerry that has enough energy left to be curious, but the greater part just reminds them that it’s easier not to wonder about anything anymore. Easier not to question what happens, and why.

“I…”

He’s very free with his ‘I’s, and there’s a part of that that grates. But there’s a flitting, antsy tenderness in his eyes that doesn’t grate at all, and Gerry thinks they mirror the nature of the rare jokes he tried to crack when they were talking. Gerry thinks about the moment that’s coming, the moment that always comes one way or another, and they feel a little nauseated, a little more shriveled, a little more old.

Eventually, Jon finds something to say that isn’t just another one of his ‘I’s, though it barely grates any less. He picks at his jeans with his hands, mouth working for a long moment, and what finally comes out is a garbled “S-so… How long… How long have you…”

Gerry grinds their teeth, just a little bit, before they force their jaw loose. Not like they can actually go to a dentist if they actually manage to fuck up their teeth, and Gerry would like _not_ to wind up dead from some sort of brain infection from a broken tooth, thanks. They’ve had enough bad shit happen to their brain for more than one lifetime. Instead, they force something that might pass for a smile onto their face. It feels like the bright and sparkling smiles Mum used to fix to her mouth when she was seething, and Gerry knows their eyes must look just the same way hers did; they’re not sure what _else_ would make Jon flinch like that, especially considering they haven’t even moved since Jon asked that question that isn’t a question, but which Gerry can parse into a demand as clearly as if it was etched into their skin, alongside all the other things that’s been etched into their skin—and Jon’s too, by the looks of him.

It’s not a weapon that’s ever really been made for Gerry. Theoretically, it could have been made for them. Their body might look the way Mum’s would if Mum had ever been stretched on a rack, but their faces, though Gerry’s has always been longer and thinner and gaunter, their faces are constructed roughly the same way, down to their mouth. Their mouths are nearly identical. There’s no reason why the smile that isn’t a smile but is just a little too much of a smile to be a snarl shouldn’t feel like it was made for Gerry’s mouth.

But it feels awkward. It’s always felt awkward, like imposing a shadow over their own flesh. Like raising the dead, and Gerry’s had a little experience of that, though not as much as… as some other people.

It feels like disappearing, and that’s why Gerry still wields the weapon, from time to time.

They smile that smile that makes Jon flinch, just a little bit, and then they soften that smile a little bit, until it’s not a snarl and it’s not a smile and it’s nothing Gerry’s ever had a name for. Bitter. Just bitter.

Gerry hooks their long, matted braid of hair with their right index finger, tries not to cringe at the oil rubbing off on their hands. Once upon a time, yeah, their hair was like this—okay, not like _this_ , but close enough—and they didn’t care much, but they were twelve in that once upon a time, they’re not twelve anymore, and they wish, wish, _wish_.

Stop. Just stop.

“Do you see this?”

Jon nods cautiously, as if he expects the braid to rear back and try to bite hm.

Gerry smiles crookedly, a real smile this time for its crookedness. “The doctors made me shave off all of my hair before the surgery. It…” This is hard. It shouldn’t be. It’s just _hair_. It’s hard. “They didn’t let me start growing it back for a while. The hunters,” they say conversationally, “haven’t let me have anything sharp since I tried to stab the old man.”

Gerry lets that one sink in.

And they watch as it sinks, sinks, sinks into Jon, watch his face sort of fold in on itself like a piece of paper being crumpled by a giant hand. Then, he nods, as if deciding something to himself. Gerry can’t say they much like that. When Gertrude was deciding something to herself without telling Gerry what it was, it usually resulted in the two of them, or just Gerry by themselves, doing something that even now prances in the background landscape of Gerry’s nightmares, close to the vanishing point but inching closer and closer with each passing night. When it was Mum, it usually ended in her calling Gerry to make sure all the doors and windows were locked and to get the fishing wire and the marker pens and come take a seat with her and roll up their sleeves. With the hunters, screaming. Just… screaming. Sometimes Gerry’s. Unfortunately, more often somebody else’s.

“Alright.”

And he’s got a _tone_ like he’s deciding something to himself, which is frankly even worse. When Mum got a tone like that, the thing she did right afterwards was usually tell Gerry to go look outside and see if there was anyone out there who looked like a cop or anyone _else_ who might come looking for Mary Keay and Child in the dead of hell o’clock in the morning. When _Gerry_ used to get a tone like that, they pretty much invariably went diving up to their necks in blood and piss and ‘what the hell is _that_?’ for something that never, _ever_ worked out the way they wanted it to.

Jon looks like the sort of person who might be a little more sensible than that. He’s a supremely mousy-looking man, and being able to look mousy in an eye-meltingly bright neon tie-dye shirt (Gerry’s not against the colors on principle, but they clash so badly it makes Gerry wish they had paint on them so they could paint over the yellow bits, at least) is… _some_ kind of achievement, though Gerry doesn’t quite know which kind, and it might not be the kind of achievement you’d write home to your folks about. Mousy-looking men are supposed to be sensible, right?

Then again, he came here trying to get information on the Unknowing without any kind of backup, let alone someone to help him try and fend off kidnapping attempts. So maybe not so sensible after all. Gerry can hope, though. And hope can go to exactly the same place it usually goes when it’s Gerry hoping.

Trying to get a lead on hope, Jon nods meaningfully towards the door. “They… You know, they left a while ago.”

Gerry feels like their mouth is full of broken glass. They don’t want to swallow. They want to swallow it all in one gulp, and at last feel something proportionate to what they _should_ be feeling. “They do that,” and if they don’t actually sound like they’ve got a mouth full of broken glass, it still feels like there’s some shards stuck in their windpipe.

“How long do you think they’ll be gone?”

“Dunno. Could be hours. Could be days.”

And in that time, Jon’s free to just… just drift off, if it pleases him to do so, and it _should_. That’s… that really is unusually kind of them, people who get brought to Gerry aren’t _ever_ that lucky, but when Gerry thinks about it, as far-gone as Herbert and Julia are, it’s possible they’re not so far-gone as to refuse to recognize what a bad thing a regime change would be for them.

Jon should go. He should really, _really_ go, because if they come back frustrated, they might not _remember_ why a regime change is such a bad thing for them.

Jon should go. He should do what no one else who’s been brought to Gerry was ever allowed to do, take the freedom Gerry never found the right words to buy for any of the others, and go home.

Jon should go.

Jon isn’t going.

Jon’s still looking at Gerry, and that restless tenderness is rippling at the corners of his eyes again. It doesn’t grate. It still doesn’t grate. It feels like something to fall into instead.

“Do you… want to stay here?”

It doesn’t feel like broken glass anymore. It feels like broken glass and rusty wire. “I don’t think I’ve really got a choice, here.” Gerry’s never had much of a choice about anything. They really would have thought Jon would have figured that out from everything they told him. Maybe the eldritch color wheel pushed that out of his head. Gerry can see how that might do it.

Not quite looking at Gerry anymore, which is new, because the whole time, Jon was either staring straight at Gerry or aggressively looking somewhere else, he never _not quite_ looked at Gerry the whole time, Jon shrugs his tie-dye-clad shoulders. Tone kind of avoiding Gerry too, “You could come with me?”

Gerry laughs, harsh and barking.

What else are they supposed to do in the face of absurdity?

Besides cry or scream, of course.

Jon bristles, not quite so much a mouse as an angry goose. “You _could_.”

Gerry keeps laughing.

Jon should leave. The fact that Jon _isn’t_ leaving, right now, makes Gerry wonder if they aren’t dreaming, if they haven’t taken a swig of some of the moonshine Herbert brings back from the hills with him sometimes, the really _strong_ moonshine Gerry’s never convinced hasn’t been laced with hallucinogens. He should leave, he should take the chance that no one else ever got and just _go_ , and why should he be dragging Gerry along behind him? None of the others would have, and why _should_ they, not when Gerry could never find the words that would have unlocked the door, would have made the hunters’ eyes clear and the hunger in their mouths recede? Why should any of the others tried to drag Gerry behind them, when they could never do anything but shut their eyes and try and fail to block out the smell of blood?

But then, they stop laughing, because Jon isn’t bristling anymore, but he’s looking at Gerry with something that isn’t tenderness but desperation, cutting and bleeding something that smells like salt instead of copper.

The floor’s still. The floor’s giving way.

 _Fuck, he’s serious_. _Fuck._

Gerry revises their assessment of Jon from ‘maybe he’s sensible’ to ‘one-hundred-percent-idiot.’ But…

But.

Gerry looks at Jon in a way they haven’t really before, _evaluating_. He’s a small man. Not _objectively_ small—Gerry’s seen Jon standing up, and his height’s dead-average, if Gerry’s still any judge of distance from the ground. But he’s still—

Here’s the thing. Some people are taller than they actually are. Take Mum. Mum was tall to start with, and even though Gerry got to be taller than her soon after they turned twelve, that didn’t matter to Gerry. Most times, they never even noticed that they were taller than Mum. Mum was always a giant in their eyes, and the only time she had ever come back down to earth, the only time Gerry had _ever_ been able to look at her and see her for the size she actually was was when—

They still smell it, sometimes. Sometimes, they smell it so strongly that their stomach revolts and, if the phantom smell comes in conjunction with literally anything else, they’ll be throwing up on somebody’s shoes and trying to pass it off as too much vodka again. (Gerry didn’t always drink as much as they do now. The hunters are amenable to it, though, and Gerry needs… ‘Drink to forget’ is such a stupid phrase; Gerry’s never forgotten anything just from drinking, and _no_ , they don’t want to hear anyone tell them that there might be a reason for that that doesn’t have a thing to do with the booze. But drinking to put things out of mind for the moment, yeah, that works.) Gerry doesn’t really want to throw up on Jon’s shoes. Jon hasn’t done anything to deserve it. They’ll stop thinking about it, now.

Gertrude was taller than she actually was, too ( _God_ , Gerry can’t even imagine Gertrude in the stillness of death). Like Jon, Gertrude was dead-average in terms of objective height, but she’d been a giant, too. And this was how Gerry had known that the man they’d almost, almost… that the man that they’d thought was Leitner hadn’t _actually_ been Leitner. Leitner would never have been so small as that gray little man had been, bleeding on the ground in front of them. It wasn’t Leitner, it just couldn’t have been.

(Gerry still tells themselves sometime that if it really had been Leitner, they wouldn’t have stopped. They think that, some days. Some days, they’re not nearly as certain.)

Jon is not Mum, and he is not Gertrude, and he is not Leitner, the _real_ Leitner. His objective height is dead-average and when Gerry looks at him, he’s just so _small_. The vessel of power beyond their ken, and yet he’s still so small. He holds himself like a man who barely knows what power is. Gerry wouldn’t be surprised if he really _does_ barely know what power is, considering all the things they had to explain to him over the past couple of hours. He definitely doesn’t understand the sort of power the hunters have, beyond the power to crack bone and rend flesh.

(Gerry understands it, though. Gerry was brought up to understand just what power is, though sometimes they think Mum’s ideas regarding power might have been just a little sideways. But that’s another story, and Gerry doesn’t want to think about the inexorability of death any more than they have to—they already have to think about it enough.)

Jon’s just so _small_ , and he’s trying to hold the door open and beckon for Gerry to follow after him, and it all seems so impossible, and it would all seem so wonderful, except if Gerry _does_ follow after them, and they do get away, all their hopes now rest on this small, mousy man not bartering their location in exchange for his safety the moment the hunters find him…

Except that isn’t right.

Gerry feels a little sick again. (They feel sick so much, they don’t know why they bother distinguishing the moments anymore, but they do, they always do, cataloguing the moments as if they’re waiting for something to catalogue them _for_.) They push past it and think, or maybe they’re thinking while still in the middle of it. It doesn’t matter. The conditions in which Gerry think rarely matters.

If the hunters catch up to them… No, _when_ the hunters catch up to them, Gerry doesn’t think that they, personally, are going to be in too much danger, beyond the obvious threat of getting kidnapped _again_. They haven’t always been the most well-liked of captives—they were still more than a little weak on that morning in the park when Julia and Herbert snatched them, and the hunters thought they were getting something with a _considerably_ different temperament than what Gerry ultimately revealed to them, only for all illusions to be smashed to a hundred thousand bleeding pieces when Gerry grabbed that dull steak knife and went for Herbert’s left armpit—but the hunters place a high value on the treasure troves of knowledge in Gerry’s head. A high enough value that even when they’ve pissed the hunters off badly enough to try their tempers, neither Herbert nor Julia, no matter _how_ pissed off they are, have ever done anything _permanent_ to Gerry, not even break their teeth with a poorly- or well-aimed punch. And yeah, there’s a lot you can do to someone without doing anything _permanent_ , but they’ve never done anything to Gerry that would make Gerry want to jump out a high window, so… not that bad, Gerry guesses?

When the hunters catch up to them, they’ll do what they have to to get Gerry back, do what they have to to keep Gerry on-hand and… _persuade_ them not to try and run off again, and things will just go on the way they have for Gerry doesn’t even count anymore, it’s better when they don’t count. And Jon, who deprived them of their walking, talking monster manual for however it takes for the hunters to catch up…

Bile builds up in Gerry’s throat again, laced with broken glass and rusty wire and all the other things they’ve imagined swallowing over the years. But Jon’s been nice to them, nicer than… than… They don’t have a metric for it.

And when the hunters catch up to him, if they haven’t already grabbed Gerry, they’ll do whatever they have to do to get what they need out of him, and then…

They won’t forgive the insult.

They’ll just kill him.

Gerry tells Jon that. If he hasn’t figured it out on his own, he _needs_ someone else to tell him that. He needs to know just who he’s trying to cross, needs to know just what he’s doing by trying to hold a door open for Gerry to walk out of behind him, needs to know just what bear trap he’s trying to put his foot in, needs to know, needs to know, needs to _know_ —

Jon squares his jaw mulishly. “That’s fine.”

“The _hell_?!” And they’re not laughing now, but screeching, and it feels so fucking _good_ to screech at someone who isn’t going to reply to it by laughing themselves, even though they can hear Mum muttering about control lost and never found again. “No, it’s not _fine!_ ”

But Jon, Jon who flinched at Gerry’s glittery little not-smile, doesn’t flinch when Gerry screams at the top of their lungs at them. “It’s _fine_. I’ve got—“

“What?! What have you got?”

And then, Jon smiles, and it’s a little like the way Gerry would imagine God smiling, if the God worshipped in the churches they walked by as a kid actually existed, and the God they _knew_ wasn’t an unknowable eye god that likes to crawl around in their head sometimes and give them tools that, yeah, have come in handy loads of times, tools that have saved Gerry’s life more than once, but the price for it’s been…

Anyway, Jon’s smiling. It’s not a bad smile. Gerry’s known a _lot_ of bad smiles, and this one is pretty nice, as smiles go. Gerry’s hackles are still up, but what he says next put them down completely. Jon smiles at Gerry, and says, almost triumphantly, “I have a car.”

Gerry opens their mouth. Then closes it.

They… don’t actually want to stay here, in this dingy hotel room that stinks of the sweat of a thousand nervous fugitives, you know. They don’t actually want to go wherever the hunters decide the hunting is best next, you know. Gerry doesn’t give a whole lot of thought to what they do want—never been much point to that—but they have spent a _lot_ of time in their life thinking a _lot_ about what they don’t want, and they don’t want this. It’s just that it’s been easier to…

Nope.

Gerry springs to their feet, grabs the bag they never bother to unpack wherever the hunters take them. When somebody wants to make decisions that are probably gonna end horribly, one way or another, it’s better not to spend too long stewing.

“Okay.” They really feel like they’re jumping out a high window now, but it also feels like Jon’s set out a trampoline for them to land on, and that’s… new. Gerry isn’t sure how they feel about it, but it is something new. “But if we’re gonna go, we’ve got to _go_. If you don’t want them catching up to us, we’ve got to get on a plane as soon as we can.”

“I already have a ticket,” Jon says, tossing off a shrug as he heads for the door. “We’ll get you one; you can use my phone.”

Gerry laughs again as he opens the door and the fresh air hits their face, sweeter than any perfume Mum ever wore. But it’s a giddy laugh, this time, and they think they might actually be smiling a smile that isn’t anything like a knife. It definitely hurts less than those smiles usually do. It doesn’t hurt at all, and maybe the pain will wait a little while before it comes back.


	2. Chapter Two

Gerard Keay isn’t much like what Jon had expected. He doesn’t know _why_ he bothers forming these preconceived notions about what people he hasn’t met are going to look like once he meets them. Even in the photos from around the time Mary Keay had died, Gerard hadn’t really looked the way Jon had expected them to, had only borne a faint resemblance to the image of Gerard that Jon has spent years now building up in his head. And really, no one _else_ looks the way he would expect. Jurgen Leitner turned out to be an aggressively ordinary-looking man. Gertrude was the most aggressively harmless-looking old woman Jon has ever seen in his life. You’d never look at Elias, upon first meeting him, without knowing what he is, and think ‘Oh, yes, _there_ is a man who is certainly an agent of everything that’s eldritch and sinister’—Elias looks like he was _born_ in a three-piece suit and sensible shoes; if you were going to suspect him of anything untoward, it would probably be _tax evasion_ , not beating someone to death with a pipe. He had thought Jude would be taller. He hadn’t expected the one image of Agnes Montague he’d unearthed deep in the bowels of the Archives to look so sad. Jane Prentiss always looks so, _so_ much bigger in his memories than the photographs.

Why shouldn’t Gerard Keay look differently than Jon had been expecting? There’s no reason at all, since Jon’s pre-conceived notions never ultimately match up with reality, and yet, even as they’re sneaking out of the hotel room together, glancing furtively at the shadows and _praying_ that Trevor and Julia went off into the woods like they actually said they would, Jon still has the image he had expected superimposed upon the reality of Gerard Keay, and it’s a little like staring at a photograph that’s been double-exposed, except the two exposures have been laid one on top of the other.

Gerard Keay, as they actually are:

Taller than Jon expected. Much taller, actually, and that can be explained only in part by the way they slouched in those old photographs, and the way they don’t slouch at all as they squint at the edges of the parking lot only partially lit up by dull and flickering lamps. Half of them don’t give off light at all, and Jon doubts that is doing anything at all to help relax Gerard’s posture, posture so rigid that at any moment, he expects to hear the crackling sound that must accompany Gerard’s spine snapping in two. The broken, mangled spider web of cracks in the faded asphalt seems to suck up the light, leaving it to illuminate far less than it could have. Gerard has bright, keen dark eyes that Jon thinks must see at least a little further than his into the dark, but Gerard has also muttered about the power of the eyes of those who have given themselves over to bloodlust and endless pursuit, and Jon would really like to get to his car, parked on the far side of the parking lot from the hotel, without testing Gerard’s eyes versus Trevor or Julia’s.

(His own might suit. They might. But Jon’s… _sight_ has rarely been sufficient to steer him away from danger before danger finds him. He doesn’t want to count on it.)

Skinnier than Jon expected, but that probably has more to do than the life they’ve been leading for as long as it’s taken for their hair to get that long, bound in a lopsided braid that nevertheless falls down to Gerard’s waist, than it does with anything else. The surgery, and what led up to that surgery, yes, that could well have had something to do with it, but that was so long ago. Wouldn’t that have ceased to have anything to do with it some time ago?

Younger than Jon expected, and he really has no excuse for that, since Gerard’s date of birth is in their file. But then, in none of the statements in which Gerard features, where the statement giver makes comment on their age, does any of them ever get it quite right. They just have the sort of face that no one can ever evaluate correctly. Jon’s been there, if, and here he thinks of his _hair_ , rather than his face, for rather different reasons.

They have a gentler voice than Jon had expected. So much gentler, actually. It reminds Jon a little of recordings of Mary Keay’s voice, especially with some of the inflections, and given what Gerard has told him of their childhood—raised solely by their mother, for long enough that they had no memory of the father whom Mary had murdered, and _that_ little detail still makes Jon feel a little sick just thinking about it, and raised largely in isolation, never allowed to attend school, never really given the opportunity to make connections independent of Mary, or so Jon was led to infer. It makes sense that Gerard’s speech patterns and tone patterns would follow after Mary’s. But there’s a difference to it. Gerard and Mary were both able to speak of terrible things in soft, gentle voices, but when Jon listens to Mary speaking, years out of the past and the grave, when she starts to speak of terrible things—and thanks to the circumstances, that’s about _all_ he’s heard her speak of, though there were also those oddly-charged pleasantries with Gertrude to consider—her voice is gentle, so gentle, and beneath that gentleness, there’s something hard. There’s nothing hard in Gerard’s gentle voice as they speak of terrible things; their voice becomes considerably less _soothing_ when they speak of terrible things, but Jon thinks that might have more to do with his own reactions and how they don’t line up the way they should, and though their voice is no longer soothing, it’s just… Jon keeps expecting to run up against Mary’s hardness, and never finds it. It just gives way, and way, and way, and after a few minutes of listening, he felt as if he was falling into that voice, and did not particularly want to come up against the ground.

Gerard Keay is taller, skinnier, younger, and more gently-voiced than Jon expects. As they finally step all the way out of the doorway of the hotel room that’s been their… home would be a _strong_ word. Cage would probably be more honest, but the thought of them shut up in a cage like a curiosity or a zoo animal makes something that feels very much like Jon’s heart hurt. As they finally step all the way out of the doorway of the hotel room onto the rickety concrete-and-rusting-metal walkway on the way to the even more rickety, clanking rusty iron stairs (if anything’s going to give them away it’s going to be those stairs, but Jon doesn’t actually know where the elevator is and doesn’t feel like Gerard would want to waste time trying to find it), Jon finally takes a long look at them standing up, straight and tall, and without a broken spine as of yet, a condition Jon hopes will persist, though given his track record…

The pain has migrated from somewhere close in his heart, to a sharp needlepoint of pain in the pit of his stomach. It will grow if he dwells upon it. Jon knows this. He’s dwelled upon it deliberately more than once, wishing for it to grow so vast and so all-consuming that he could just drop himself down inside of it and never have to emerge again. He can’t do that right now. Not when they haven’t even gotten away yet.

Sunrise is maybe half an hour away, or maybe twenty minutes. Jon’s never been too enamored of the idea of getting up to watch the sunrise under _any_ circumstances, and so he doesn’t know how long it takes for the sky to shift from its present state, a darkness that was no longer the pitch-black of midnight being crawled upon by indigo and reddish-violet the closer you get to the horizon, to the pale, dazzling blue of sunrise on a cloudless morning. The sooner it gets to that point, the better, for if Trevor and Julia come after them the way Gerard seems convinced they will, it will be easier to see them coming if Jon can see further in front of him than six feet.

(Gerard would know better than him on that score. Jon can concede that. Gerard would know _much_ better than him just how quickly Julia Montauk and Trevor Herbert will chase after them once they’ve realized Gerard is gone. If that happens, _when_ that happens…

Jon will just make certain Gerard is already out of the country by the time that happens. Anything past that, and—

Once they’re home, it will be fine. It will be fine.)

Standing up, moving around, Gerard Keay looks a little… It’s hard to explain how they look, at least not in a way that verges into the overly and needlessly flowery. Jon doesn’t typically wish to explain things in flowery terms; he’s not good at it, doesn’t feel like taking the opportunity to improve his skills (If that’s something that he should even be trying to improve in the first place, which he is honestly not certain of at all). Under the harsh fluorescent light of the light fixtures set into the ceiling of the walkway (which it’s only now occurring to Jon is also the walkway of the third floor, which _creaks_ with every last gust of wind that’s already hot and sticky in spite of the fact that it’s not even _day_ yet, and while Jon really doesn’t think he’s going to be killed by having a building collapse on top of him—that seems entirely too mundane, compared to the number of things more likely to kill him instead—it’s not what he’d call _reassuring_ ), Gerard’s pallid face looks white as fresh paper, and the angry scar tissue visible on their hands and behind the crumpled collar of their unbuttoned shirt and over the just as crumpled neckline of their old, faded undershirt looks even more luridly red than it did before. The tattoos on their knuckles and the joint of their wrist seem to stare at Jon even more intently than they did in the hotel room when he was tripping over himself, fumbling and spluttering and trying to keep up with something so far outside his paygrade that if it wasn’t just his _life_ , now, he wasn’t certain he would have ever tried to grapple with it at all.

(That’s a lie. He absolutely would have done.)

Their hair hasn’t really improved under the harsh fluorescent light, either. Hair that had looked untidy and unwashed in the dim light of a hotel room with all of the blinds drawn and few of the lights on looks… not filthy, not quite, but definitely _grimy_ , a color that reminds Jon of nothing quite so much as a tarnished silver spoon. Jon tries not to think about how long it’s been since Gerard’s hair was last washed, properly washed, but that bleeds into thinking about how long it took for their hair to get that long _braided_ , and everything that accompanies that, and then, he has to stop.

More than that, Gerard looks… Despite Jon’s earlier commitment not to lean into flowery language he has little to no experience with and _certainly_ no facility with, he drifts a little closer towards it anyways. Gerard stalks towards the rickety stairs, and they’re all arms and legs and long, skinny body, and staring at them, Jon is reminded a little of the skeleton of a crane that was on display at a natural history museum he visited as a child. It had been arranged as if in flight, in spite of the fact that even preserved flesh was absent and all that was left was the bones, to poke out into the air like an especially tragic child’s macaroni project, if it had been glued together so efficiently that it no longer needed to be attached to paper to maintain its integrity.

They’re both spindly, and pale, and bony (Heh). That is the limit of the similarities, though if Gerard later turns out to be a swimmer, Jon will be triumphant among his own company, if nobody else’s, and will tell himself that insight came entirely from his own mind, and nowhere else.

No, Gerard Keay in real life, standing before Jon’s eyes, bears relatively little resemblance to the image that Jon built up in his head. Gerard Keay has spent so long standing larger than life in Jon’s head that the genuine article was never likely to measure up to his own pre-conceived notions. He’d never stopped to think about that. Gerard had seemed… They had seemed like a character in a book, or a figure from folklore, or a celebrity you occasionally catch sight of on the front cover of the tabloids in the grocery stores, but which you never pick up to read, for fear that something about the lies spewed out on cheap, flimsy paper will find a way to burrow into your mind and alter your perceptions of what is real and what isn’t, and force you to regard the world the way those who credulously believe every last thing the tabloids tell them do.

Or maybe that’s just Jon. He doesn’t think his thoughts on tabloids are quite the typical, at least not anymore.

For so long, he’s carried in his head an image of Gerard Keay that has felt larger than life, and over time, gotten so much larger that it’s distorted into something that doesn’t really feel entirely human. And that might be reflective of Jon’s own experiences, as well. Much as he doesn’t want his perceptions of the world to shift any more than they already have, he’s not certain how much of a _choice_ he even has. Or maybe he has all the choice in the world. Maybe he has all the choice in the world, and that was entirely his own doing, whether he was cognizant of it or not.

Anyone who had read the statements in which Gerard features would understand the image that rose up in Jon’s mind, though to anyone who hasn’t, it probably all seems _considerably_ less reasonable. The more Jon read about them, and after a while, he had found himself deliberately digging through the old boxes of files, trying to find something more about Gerard Keay—it does not help, not at _all_ , that any and all statements where Gerard Keay features date to well _after_ the labeling on the files ceases to make any sense whatsoever—the more he found himself driven by something more powerful than curiosity, but weaker than obsession. (He can eventually give up that search, once there’s something else that demands his attention, once he gets hungry, or tired, or _bored_. Jon can’t remember the last time he willfully refused to take the tape recorder with him somewhere.) Fascination, maybe. He built up in his head an image of something almost more than human, something that could somehow be inhuman, and not, and not…

That was a little presumptuous. Alright, it was more than a little presumptuous. Jon watches Gerard stumble a little and curse under their breath as they reach the stairs—there’s a bit of a bump they either didn’t know about, or just forgot about—and they seem entirely human to him. His judgment on such matters hasn’t, hasn’t always been the most reliable, but Gerard Keay seems so much more ordinary than Jon had ever expected. They don’t seem like the one who tracked Dominic Swain down to his apartment without directions. They don’t seem like the person who gave Andrea Nunis the advice she needed to survive a near-fatal encounter in Genoa. They _really_ don’t seem like the person who nearly beat Jurgen Leitner to death with their bare hands, even though Jon’s gotten positive confirmation that yes, that was them. They do seem like the person who killed the man who was probably Diego Molina and saved a hospital from burning down, but that’s only because those burns scarred _badly_ and do not seem to have faded even a little from the livid red they have to have held since late 2011. (Jon’s hand twinges. He rubs it absently, and grits his teeth when this only makes the twinging worse.) They don’t even seem like the adult version of the kid who put a hole in a wall under Pall Mall. They just…

They seem like someone who’s been held captive by a pair of murderers for entirely too long. That’s what they’ve seemed like since Jon first laid eyes on them. And, and, it had become a little hard to breathe, after a while, something that only coalesced into a line of thought he could actually _understand_ when Gerard finally drew his attention to their hair, their _hair_ that falls in a braid all the way down to their waist, must be even longer when the braid’s undone, hair that most likely hasn’t been cut since it was shaved off for the surgery that wound up saving their life. (There had actually been reports that Gerard was _dead_. Jon doesn’t think he’s ever been so happy to have received bad information, and not find out it was bad until the contradiction’s staring him in the face with a decidedly unimpressed look on _theirs_.)

That’s how long…

That’s how long it’s been, and no one has come looking for them.

No one came looking for them. Gertrude left, and never came back. Mary Keay wasn’t just dead, but _gone_ —by Gerard, so far gone that even an avatar of the End couldn’t call them back, if that avatar was the sort of person who even _could_ call them back from death. Only if she tried giving herself to the End again, and Gerard seemed certain that that wouldn’t work, that the burning of the pages would be taken as a rejection, even if the rejection had been made for Mary on someone else’s behalf. (And Jon doesn’t quite know how to unpack how _insistent_ Gerard was on this point, let alone the _quality_ of their insistence. That can wait until they’re back in London, when they’re not facing down pursuit by a pair of murderers, not facing down the specter of being murdered themselves if Julia and Trevor catch up to them.)

No one came looking for Gerard. In all this time, no one ever thought to came looking, and once Gertrude was killed, maybe… maybe there wasn’t anyone who even _knew_ to come looking. No one… no one had come looking for Jon. Just Michael, and given what Michael had _wanted_ … No one had even _known_ to come looking for—

_I can’t, I can’t do it again._

Impulsive and objectively stupid, and Gerard had wasted _no_ time in telling him so, and Jon had _not_ thought just from talking with them that they could get so loud so quickly, but…

But, they agreed.

And now, they’re leaving, and Jon’s standing on this rickety, creaking walkway, watching Gerard trip on a bump at the top of the stairs like anyone would with not enough familiarity and too little sleep, and in the harsh, fluorescent light of the light fixtures that competes now with the slightly-strengthened light of a sun still a-ways away from the horizon, they look so remarkably _ordinary_ that for a moment it’s almost impossible to believe that they are the same person Jon’s spent years reading about.

The moment passes, and he doesn’t feel the sort of disappointment he would have expected, under other circumstances, or even under these circumstances. In the light of too-powerful fluorescent fixtures designed to banish darkness from midnight, in the gentle light of pre-dawn, Gerard Keay looks altogether ordinary, with no hint of the uncanny making itself immediately apparent upon their person. They look like any other tourist who might elsewhere in this country be trudging out to their car at too early in the morning to make sure they reach the airport in time.

( _Do they still have their passport?_ )

It’s not disappointing. In a weird way, it’s charming, charming enough that Jon can feel a strange little smile tugging at the corners of his lips. It’s all the more extraordinary that Gerard could have done all the things they’ve done in the statements where they feature, and everything else they’ve no doubt been doing out of sight of anyone who’d ever think to come to the Magnus Institute to pour out their soul onto paper, when they’re—

As if aware of Jon’s thoughts—and for all that they look so perfectly ordinary, they just might be—Gerard turns around and squints at him. Brusquely, though not so brusque that Jon can’t hear the uncertainty hiding a few inches beneath, “Are you coming? If we don’t want Herbert and Montork jumping us, we need to _go_.”

—When they’re someone whom Jon doubts could ever hold their own against Trevor and Julia in a straight fight. When they’re someone who could so easily have died in nearly every dangerous situation they put themselves in, when they’re someone who could easily die now. That strange fondness that early on crept in to roost alongside his heart is, is not gone, not exactly, but it’s quieter, giving way easily to the needs of the moment. They both have more important things to do than drink in the sunrise (who even _does_ that, anyways? Jon’s always had a hard time crediting the idea that anyone could just… get up while it’s still dark, especially in the summertime, just so they can watch the sun come up. It sounds like the sort of thing someone does when they have too much time on their hands, or raging insomnia, or they’re short on things to brag about and want to add something else to the repertoire.), more important things to do than stare at each other.

The question of Gerard’s passport continues to nag at the back of Jon’s mind, until they’re climbing into the car and it’s no longer in the back of his mind but in the front of it. Gerard Keay absolutely seems like the sort of person who would know how to get their hands on a new passport in a short amount of time, _definitely_ seems like the sort of person who would know where to go to get their hands on a competent forgery, but that must take time, time they might not have if Julia and Trevor guess where they’re going and _they_ manage to get a car.

The first time Jon tries to ask, it’s just after he’s put the key into the ignition, and Gerard makes a weird noise in the back of their throat and tells him to wait until _after_ they’ve gotten out of the parking lot and onto the road.

With _that_ , Jon’s tempted to invent some vital object he noticed Gerard leaving behind in the hotel room, but he hasn’t pulled shit like that since he and Georgie were still together, and only for as long as it took for Georgie to make it clear to him how much she did _not_ appreciate stuff like that, even as a joke. And besides, Gerard gets a look on their face like they’re about to start hyperventilating when he doesn’t immediately put the car in reverse, and Jon doesn’t remember how to help someone who’s hyperventilating (And it’s too early in the morning to figure out if he can just pull the knowledge from nowhere at will.) He sighs, shakes his head, and pulls out of the parking spot.

The second time Jon tries to ask, they’re on the road, pulling towards a traffic light swinging gently in a breeze just strong enough for Jon to feel it pushing against the driver’s side of the car. The car is moving, even if he’s slowing down in deference to the red light, and he actually manages to get the whole question out this time.

“The hunters never bothered taking it,” Gerard confirms, stroking the lumpy canvas of the bag they insisted on having in the front seat with them instead of loading it into the back with Jon’s things. “It’s a bit beat up, but it was beat up before I came here in the first place; I don’t think we should have any problems with it in the airport.”

Jon blinks. He’s… He’s not going to complain about it. That will make getting out of the country so much easier, and this way, neither of them have to worry about airport security realizing that Gerard’s trying to get through with a fake passport, but all the same…

“Why _not_?”

Now clutching the bag instead of stroking it, Gerard shrugs their shoulders in such a way that makes Jon wonder how it ever was that virtually all of the statement-givers who ever spoke about Gerard Keay mistook them for so much older than they actually are. That shrug is the sort of shrug that Jon didn’t even think it was _possible_ to accomplish once you turned twenty, let alone pull off so thoroughly that for a moment, just a moment, even _Jon_ forgets that Gerard isn’t actually a teenager. “I dunno,” they say, so casually that Jon almost misses the undercurrent of tension thrumming in their voice. “Most of the time, I think they just didn’t give a shit. They know I’m never getting far enough away from them in time to get away from them for good, so why bother taking the passport?” They turn their head, staring up at the sagging upholstery on the car ceiling before going on speculatively, “Probably didn’t want their walking, talking monster manual getting deported, either. I’d probably get deported now, either way; my tourist visa expired _ages_ ago. But not having a passport definitely wouldn’t help. And maybe they just sort of figured that if I could get all the way to an airport without them catching up to me, and book a flight without them catching up to me, and get on a _plane_ without them catching up with me, I’d just sort of earned it?”

They don’t sound hopeful. They really _don’t_ sound hopeful. Jon doesn’t want to be the one to point it out, he _really_ doesn’t want to be the one who points it out, but there’s nobody else in the car _to_ point it out. He wonders about the tape recorder, sometimes, but he hasn’t heard it talking yet. It wouldn’t start now. That would be _much_ less awkward.

“…Gerard, that doesn’t really sound like—“

Gerard makes a face. “Yeah, I know. It was just kinda nice to think about for five minutes. They haven’t got any papers, and I _don’t_ think they wanna get themselves deported. It was just nice to think about them maybe letting me go back to London and just staying here themselves. But yeah, not gonna happen. If we get out of here without them catching up, I’d say we’ve got a couple of months while they get their shit sorted out. London’s a big place, but—“

Now, it’s Jon making a face. “But they both know exactly where to find _me_.” On a long exhale, “Fantastic.”

“You might have guessed I think this is a stupid plan.”

“And yet, here you are.”

The light turns green, and Jon pulls away from the intersection. Honestly, he’s looking forward to no longer seeing the hotel in the rear-view mirror. Besides everything else that went on there, it’s not even a very _nice_ hotel; the mattress was murder on his neck. In that time, Gerard blinks rapidly, as if coming to that realization for the first time. Finally, he says slowly, “I’ve come up with some stupid plans myself. Do you know _anybody_ who might be able to deal with them if they come looking for you back home?”

“I… might.” If they’ll even listen to him long enough to decide whether or not they just want to laugh in his face at such a request. Jon’s spent enough time burning bridges, and little enough time building new ones, that he really can’t be sure, can’t be sure at all.

“I could probably shake them off long enough to call in some favors,” Gerard mutters, more to themselves than to Jon—or so Jon had thought, anyways. Soon, Gerard isn’t staring down at their bag, but at him, with a long, piercing stare that feels an awful lot like Gerard is trying to pick the lock to the door into Jon’s mind, and for all Jon knows, they could be. If they are, he can’t feel it at all. “Are you _sure_ you know somebody who can deal with them?” they ask dubiously. “I could probably get somebody to deal with them for both of us. _Deal_ with them,” they add significantly, one eyebrow raised.

Jon doesn’t know why it is that he doesn’t realize immediately just what Gerard means by that. The kind of circles he’s been running in lately, you would think he would catch on the moments the words were out of Gerard’s mouth. He supposes it could just be some last, desperate effort on the mind’s part to cling to the world that was his before all of _this_ started, but even that doesn’t really ring true. All of _this_ started when he picked up a children’s book with a gold bookplate fastened to the front cover, over twenty years ago. The world he would be going back to, prior to that one moment, wasn’t a world Jon was entirely sure he _wanted_ to go back to. It was barren and gray, and he really _had_ been a rather unpleasant child. Jon did not want to go back to being an unpleasant child once again (Though considering what an unpleasant _adult_ he had turned out to be, maybe the child would have been less of an eyesore in the lives of those who were forced to deal with him).

He’s never really had a world free of the eldritch and the sinister and the frankly _insane_. Not since those giant, _giant_ grasping legs reached out through a door that should never have opened. It’s just that Jon, for the longest time, and at the cost of— It’s just that for the longest time, he was able to ignore it. Because it didn’t involve him personally, because it didn’t involve the one thing he _knew_ was paranormal, and if something that got his attention wasn’t the one thing he knew was paranormal, it was easy to write it off as lies or the rantings of someone drunk, high, or laboring under mental illness. His world before he accepted that it was _all_ real still wasn’t, wasn’t pleasant, because there was still that _one_ thing, but it had been much, much easier to actually live in.

He’s not living in that world anymore. That world was just an illusion. So, really, Jon had never been living in it at all. Jon’s living in the world he’s living in now, and this is a world where he really should have understood what Gerard meant by ‘deal with them,’ without having to take a moment to think about it.

But part of his mind yet clings to that vanished illusion, and so, Jon doesn’t really catch on to the implications of it until he’s braking in deference to the traffic light at the next intersection (Why does every single light turn red as he’s pulling up to it?). The words sink in like the point of a knife. “Do you… Do you really think that’s…”

Gerard looks at him again, long and hard, and this time, Jon can see how people might think they’re so much older than they actually are. They carry every single one of their years, and likely some that belonged once to somebody else. “Between the two of us, which one’s actually been living with them?” they ask hollowly.

Rather than actually answer, Jon lets out a long, shuddering breath.

“They’re gonna be furious that you’ve helped me,” Gerard plows on. “Actually, they’re gonna be a _lot_ worse than furious; they’ll be absolutely fucking _livid_. Those two hold grudges like we breathe air, and you’re probably only questionably human to them, anyways. They were probably always gonna come after you sooner or later, but now, they’ve got a reason to do it a _lot_ sooner.” They look at him a third time, and Jon watches as they shrink a little in the passenger’s seat, seeming to fold in on themselves, scraping their fingers against the canvas as if clawing at dirt. “They grabbed you because you were asking around about me.” Jon never told Gerard that. Jon doesn’t bother asking how Gerard knew that. “You wouldn’t even be on their radar if it hadn’t been for me.”

Jon snorts, because it’s less awkward than answering _that_ seriously. “I think you’d be surprised by how easily I walk into trouble.” As if in agreement, his hand twinges again.

Gerard scoffs. “We’ve got that in common.” For a moment, some wry, almost bitter humor brightens their wan face, but then, it disappears like the sun disappeared almost as soon as it rose a few minutes ago, hidden by dense clouds rolling in from the east. Gerard presses their fingertips, more sharp nails than skin, into their forehead, so hard and so deep that red marks bloom almost instantly in their skin. “Look, Jon,” they say tiredly, “I’m not saying you’ve never gotten in trouble before. I’m not saying I know how you deal with trouble. And if it was somebody else, we might be able to talk them down. Most everybody can be talked into not killing somebody else, if you know what to say.

“But I _know_ them. And you’re _not_ going to talk them down. Just, just, just trust me on that, okay? I’ve had long enough to try every last thing I could think of, and none of it ever worked.” Now, they still look wan, but with a faint greenish cast creeping in, up past the abrupt border of scar tissue on their neck. “Nothing ever worked, once they’d decided they were gonna kill somebody. Nothing you say to them is going to make any difference.” Gerard stares straight into Jon’s eyes, then, once again, their dark gaze more piercing than ever. “If they come after you, if you want to _live_ , they have to be _dealt_ with. They get it into their heads to kill you, and they won’t go away on their own. That’s not how hunters _work_ , not _those_ hunters, not with anything weaker than them. Got it?”

Jon chooses not to be insulted by being held up against Trevor and Julia and found wanting, in that respect, anyways.

“ _Got it_?” Gerard repeats, more insistently, eyes brightening with something stronger than concern, but somewhat less than panic, if only because exhaustion is clinging still to the corners of their eyes, the dullness around the edges a stronger indication of weariness than any red-eye could ever hope to be.

But this is not a game for Gerard, not the way a good hunt can become a game for those who make it their business to hunt. It should not be a game to Jon, either. It hasn’t been, and he doesn’t want to think of just what puts that insistent note in Gerard’s voice, not right now. So Jon nods, if a little shortly, but he doesn’t think he needs to make his nod any _longer_. “Alright,” he says softly, and now, at last, he looks away. “Alright, Gerard.”

Eventually, there are no more intersections, only highway, and they drive on and on for a few miles in a silence punctuated only by the revving of engines in the cars around them, and the occasional beeping of a car horn, and the occasional rumble of thunder from off in the east.

Then, _completely_ randomly, Gerard tells him, “You can call me Gerry.”

And here’s another thing it takes Jon a moment to process enough to actually comprehend it, though he thinks he prefers the reasons for the first few moments of incomprehension a _thousand_ times more than the last time he had to take a few moments to understand something Gerard said to him. Suddenly _excruciatingly_ conscious of how idiotic it must make him sound, the only thing he can respond with is a blank, “What?”

Gerard hunches their bony shoulders, folding in on themselves once again. When Jon chances a glance away from the road, Gerard is looking at him the way he imagines a cat looks at a strange dog when they can’t decide if the dog is going to try to chase them or not. “I said you could call me Gerry.” Definitely sounds like a teenager. Not a surly teenager, though; just an awkward, uncertain teenager. “I…” That pause is so pregnant, Jon’s half-surprised not to hear it go into labor. “…I’ve always wanted my friends to call me Gerry.”

And the implication that nobody else has ever called them ‘Gerry’ that they can actually remember does not go unnoticed, but at this point, it’s just joining the list of things that’s too depressing and/or horrifying to think about while he’s still so far from home, still so far from somewhere quiet and reasonably stable where he can actually begin to _try_ to unpack that. …Which is probably not a luxury that _Gerry_ has ever gotten, but it’s one that Jon is going to exercise anyways, because he _is_ trying to drive this car without causing an accident.

The first thought that doesn’t get shoved right in the ‘later’ box or the _‘much_ later’ box is to wonder at Gerry’s standards for declaring someone their friend, though this line of thought is, in and of itself, dangerously close to catapulting itself into the ‘next year at the _earliest_ ’ box. They met less than twelve hours ago, and they’re really…

Well.

Jon stops and thinks about it.

He hasn’t really thought about it in such terms, but they _have_ just gone on the run together. They’ve gone on the run together with extreme risk of violence and death attached to being caught by their potential pursuers. And Jon has already started calling them ‘Gerry’ in his head.

A little jittery, but still loud enough to be clearly heard: “Alright, Gerry.”

Gerry smiles at them, and Jon thinks foolishly a sort of thought he hasn’t thought since he was maybe twelve: _Gerry Keay wants to be my friend._


	3. Chapter Three

Gerry rarely has pleasant dreams. The last time their dreams were consistently something other than nightmares, they might have been… They can’t remember, not exactly. Definitely younger than twelve. Ten, maybe? Let’s just go with ten, for now. Ten is about how old they were when they really started to realize that Mum’s business contacts and ‘friends’ (Gerry wonders sometimes, whether Mum ever had a friend in the conventional sense of the word. There are people she _called_ friends, but the actual nature of their relationship was considerably more transactional) weren’t what anyone outside of their ‘circle’ would call normal people. Ten is around the age when they really started to take notice of those people’s behaviors, and just what happened to the normal people they crossed paths with. Ten is around the age when it finally sank in for Gerry that they are always, always, _always_ being watched, that privacy is a lie and secrecy a desperate grasp at a world that never existed to begin with. Ten is around the age when Gerry first came to grips with the fact that most of the people they get on a bus or a train with don’t perceive the world at all in the same way that they do.

(And still they struggle to understand what it would be to comprehend the world in any different way.)

Gerry rarely has pleasant dreams. They count it fortunate, as fortunate as things ever can be, that they rarely remember their dreams as anything more than a kaleidoscope of jumbled colors and sounds, sound and fury incapable of being parsed into anything significant. The waking world is what it is, and the way they deal with it is what it is as well. Gerry can’t help but think, though, that their relationship with the waking world would probably shift significantly if they had to drag their dreams into the waking world in more than little broken bits of glass. Little slivers of glass can embed themselves in the waking world without risking doing damage to the canvas. Bring out great _shards_ of glass, bring out something bigger than about the size of your fist, and you risk ripping up the canvas and having to deal with all that lurks behind it.

Gerry rarely has pleasant dreams, but if not for the jolts that come from the car hitting pothole after pothole on yet another shitty American highway, they might think they’re dreaming now, having the sort of good, peaceful dream they haven’t had in years. Okay, so a beat-up old rental car driving down another shitty American highway isn’t exactly what anyone would call a typical venue for a _pleasant_ dream, and given Gerry’s own problems with Desolation-induced burn scars, they’re probably gonna be sore as all hell within a couple of hours at _best_ , but Gerry’s standards have never been what anybody would really call typical. They don’t always understand people very well—hard to understand what you have little practical experience of—but they do understand that much. The Beholding has given them _some_ gifts.

No question as to _why_ this feels so much like a pleasant dream. No question at all. No question why Gerry feels as buoyant as if they’ve knocked back an entire bottle of cheap champagne, even with their bag sitting on their legs, feeling heavier than ever with all of the things the hunters never bothered to take away from them, with some of the shitty gas station novels they’ve bought in the interims of crippling boredom in between the deep pits of dread and terror and helpless, impotent rage. No need to dwell on it for too long. If they dwell on it too long, they might hurt it, or destroy it completely, as it feels like they do often whenever they get some fragile chance at something better than whatever it is they currently have. ( _Could have been nicer to the doctors, could have just stayed in the bookshop and try to run it without the kind of deals Mum got up to, could have just let the cancer go on and on until it killed me, could have just left Molina alone, could have tried harder with that woman in Genoa, could have, could have, could have…_ )

You might have gathered that Gerry isn’t all that fond of American highways. Truth be told, they’re not fond of _any_ highways. Part of that is that Gerry never did learn how to drive a car—living in London, it had never seemed at all necessary to them, and it certainly hadn’t seemed necessary to _Mum_ that they learn—and they are consumed with a perverse irritation with everyone who _did_ learn how to drive a car, if they happen not to be driving the car that Gerry’s currently a passenger in. (Sometimes that perverse irritation does extend to the driver of the car they’re in, though that’s typically most true of those people who get behind the wheel of a car and think that makes them the most _powerful person in the world_ —Gerry’s never going to get over that one taxi driver in Chicago, it’s never going to happen, stop asking about it.) Another part of that is that they can practically smell the concentrated essence of Entities rising up out of the asphalt when it gets really hot. Gerry doesn’t know what it is, exactly, but there’s something about highways, busy or deserted, urban or rural, brand-new or sixty years old and crumbling, that just draws the Entities to them and provides them with endless, _endless_ sources of power and influence. Gerry only _thought_ London was an epicenter for every last eldritch power-broker and bottom-feeder, until they came to America and got a good, long look at the highway system. Gerry would say that that is some sort of achievement, though they’re not at all certain what _kind_.

This interstate… Gerry forgets just which interstate it is. Gertrude always drove when they traveled together, and whenever the hunters managed to get a car, it was always Julia who drove. Gerry didn’t bother figuring out which interstate it was when it was Gertrude driving because for once, just for _once_ , it wasn’t them being relied on for directions.

( _I don’t get lost_ , they had said to Gertrude, once. _I never get lost, unless I want to be lost—even then, it’s_ hard _for me to get lost and stay lost_. Gertrude had asked about that, very early on—she had heard from someone who had heard from someone who had heard it whispered to them by a ‘colleague,’ of sorts, that Gerry was uncannily good at finding places they ought not be able to find—and honestly, considering everything that came from that, a lot of the time, Gerry wishes they’d never told Gertrude that at all. They’ve got no guarantee, they know, that Gertrude wouldn’t just have yanked the information out of their mind, but they really wish they hadn’t been so free with it. Mum had just… Mum had just… They had felt unmoored and uprooted and they were looking for something to tie them back down to earth, and Gertrude had seemed the best possible option, with just how much she reminded them of Mum a lot of the time. But ‘a lot of the time’ doesn’t equal up to ‘all of the time,’ and unfortunately, Gerry thinks they know exactly _why_ they can’t ever find it in themselves to regret it wholeheartedly:

They’re a glutton for punishment. They’re a junkie for excitement. They sniff out a little bit of danger, catch the slightest hint that something _interesting’s_ going on, and they can’t help but wander up and try to see it for themselves. It’s gonna get them killed, some day, if something else doesn’t get them first. The cancer could come back, they could get hit by a car, anybody out of the list of people Mum’s pissed off over the years—it’s not _that_ long of a list, in the grand scheme of things; Mum had a good sense of who it was safe to piss off, and who it wasn’t, and how to deal with the latter without coming off like somebody who’d just lie there and take it—decides they aren’t content with the idea of Mary Keay being deader than dead, and taking out their pent-up resentment on the kid who looks just like her, apart from having been stretched on a rack, would be _just_ the thing to work out their aggression, or they could get struck by lightning, and unlike what happened with Michael Crew, it _wouldn’t_ be their Vast avatar origin story, they’d just be dead. But still, they go sniffing out what’s interesting, just for the chance to see something _new_. Sometimes, there’s the added bonus of a Leitner to burn, but Gerry has to be honest with themselves—they can’t really trust anybody _else_ to be, after all—and admit that the absence of a Leitner wouldn’t be enough to convince them to stay home. There are things the Eye wants them to see too badly, too badly for them to just want to just stay at home and sulk.

 _But I want it, too. Don’t I? I chose this, didn’t I?_ )

Gerry didn’t bother figuring out which interstate it was when it was Gertrude driving. Gertrude kept maps, and made assiduous use of them. She had Gerry make use of their own… gifts, when it was necessary, when she needed them, but when she didn’t need them, they were put away and allowed to gather dust, and never, _ever_ looked at, no matter the circumstances, no matter how much Gerry longed for those gifts to be looked at, to be recognized and acknowledged. No matter how much Gerry longed to be looked at, to be recognized and acknowledged. She just couldn’t—

Do you know, there had been times when Gerry had almost thought that Gertrude was _fond_ of them?

—just couldn’t. Gerry isn’t certain what it was Gertrude couldn’t do. They have a hard time thinking of ‘Gertrude’ and ‘can’t,’ together, have a hard time stringing that together into the same sentence. Gertrude Robinson’s not the sort of person you think of as being someone who _can’t_ do something. ( _God, I can’t believe she’s actually_ dead. _I can’t imagine her dead._ ) But there was something she couldn’t do, not when it came to them. Just couldn’t, just couldn’t.

Or just wouldn’t, but that’s not, that’s not…

This is a _pleasant_ dream, you know. Or it’s not a dream, but it’s certainly something that feels like the elusive and much sought-after pleasant dream. Gerry’s going to drop this line of thought, now, and they’ll reflect only briefly on the fact that they tried harder to mark highways when it was Julia driving, but that Julia and Herbert were so good at disorienting them that they never did have much luck. (Neither of them ever liked the interstates. They much preferred the backroad highways where you hardly ever saw a police car. Vicious creatures, but not stupid.)

The scenery… Actually, Gerry’s not sure they can say that the scenery’s ‘not so bad’ or ‘not so good,’ since the scenery is much the same as every last interstate they’ve been driven down that isn’t running straight through the middle of a city. The interstate is three lanes on either side, divided by segmented concrete walls about six feet tall. Sometimes, there’s grass growing between those walls, but for the most part, they go too high for Gerry to ever see inside, and they just have to guess. On the exterior, there’s a wide verge of cracked, crumbling concrete, and then chain link fence boxing in every last car, truck, and caravan that decides they want to take a ride down the highway. Overhead, the sky is pregnant with swirling pewter clouds. A few fat raindrops fling themselves down onto the pollen-streaked windshield of the car, leaving Jon to mutter something about _more_ rain, really? Raindrops pepper the blisteringly hot asphalt, sending off wisps of steam, and with that steam there rises up the faint, copper scent of blood. It smells of Hunt, and it smells of Slaughter, and it smells of Flesh as well. Police and high-speed chases and road rage and roadkill and the pulsing, oozing arteries connecting slaughterhouses to one another. But it’s just a background scent, and though Gerry feels a little queasy focusing on it, they can soon push it aside, and smell it no more.

The trees lining either side of the highway are worth commenting on, surprisingly. This part of the country, Gerry’s used to the only trees you see on either side of an interstate being pine trees, and many of them half-dead, with streaks of putrid brown laced in with that dense Prussian green that can itself lean towards brown or gray depending on the time of year or the weather conditions or, Gerry suspects, the composition of the soil.

But these trees aren’t pine trees—their soft, broad, flat leaves, so delicate that what little light remains as the clouds darken and thicken and the rain thickens shines right through their leafy flesh. Gerry doesn’t recognize the species; it’s been a while since they’ve had any opportunity to make art, and even longer since they last created any art that involved the… the _glories_ of nature. These trees are nice. They might try and figure out more about them, if they ever have the chance, if they ever have the opportunity to make arm again.

The species doesn’t strike a bell. The color does, though. Gerry looks at it and thinks of Scheele’s Green. Gerry looks at those leaves and thinks of paintings and Victorian dresses and painters and miners and false flower-makers falling victim to vomiting and stomach pain and numbness until finally the green is all they can see, and then they die. There’s a lot more that goes on before they die, but that’s what Gerry remembers of arsenic poisoning at the moment, and they don’t really want to go digging into the back of their mind, and want to go asking the Beholding for the information even less.

…And they probably shouldn’t be thinking of arsenic poisoning when they think of trees. Honestly, now that they think about it, that makes them think of poisoned trees, and who wants to think about that?

The rain soon starts to fall thick enough that Gerry can’t make the trees out clearly, and they let the thought go. Drumming steadily against the roof of the car, it’s almost enough to lull Gerry into something like peace, though the thought of the hunters having come back just a few minutes after they left, realized they were gone, and grabbed a car off of a hapless hotel-goer to come chasing after them never quite leaves the back of Gerry’s mind. Gerry’s never been one to fall asleep in a car. They don’t think the pattern will be broken today.

There’s another reason the pattern won’t be broken today, and it’s sitting in the driver’s seat next to them.

Alright, he hasn’t actually done much yet, but Jon’s… Gerry stands by their assessment of him as a small, mousy man, at least in looks. Unless he’s just completely failed to comprehend the sort of risk the hunters pose to him, or unless that insistent ‘fine’ was indicative of something very much like those things Gerry would contemplate in the middle of the night sometimes after Mum sewed herself into the book, definitely not a little mouse in temperament. That second thought of angry goose might not be so far off-track, though Gerry hopes Jon turns out to be less easily-edible than a goose. Granted, the hunters haven’t ever made it a point to eat what they kill—they’ve not been veering _so_ close to Flesh as all that—but they could definitely pluck a goose and cut it up for a butcher to find.

Braver than Gerry had thought at first glance. First impressions aren’t to be relied on, first impressions are things only worth throwing away after five minutes, but Gerry still formed them, anyways. Gerry formed them, and let them run and run and run until the deceptiveness of them formed a brick wall for Gerry to run into.

So.

Jonathan Sims.

Beholding’s obvious now that Gerry’s managed to look past that Web lighter (Gerry would say _who carries around an eldritch lighter_? but they managed to make their own lighter eldritch by _accident_ by painting an eye on it—the fucking thing would just light up on its own sometimes, usually when something weird was going on somewhere nearby and Gerry had happened to leave the lighter out on the bedside table so they could sleep. The Beholding’s been remarkably persistent in pestering them to go out and look at things, especially when Gerry’s too stoved up to even _want_ to get out of bed, ever again). Beholding’s so obvious that Gerry’s honestly amazed they didn’t feel it while Jon was still outside of the hotel room; the only way it could be more obvious would be if Jon had a halo in the shape of a giant, shiny eye dangling up over his head. Probably not that much of a shock that Julia and Herbert were on him so fast; they might have been even if he hadn’t been asking around about Gerry.

The Web’s still… It makes sense for the Archivist to exhibit no stronger influence than that of the Beholding, but the Web is tricky. Anybody who comes into this world as a child knows how tricky the Web is, knows how cunning and subtle, knows how fucking _impossible_ it is to get rid of it completely once it’s found its way inside, knows you’re just going to have to live with the little bits and pieces you weren’t able to burn out, and hope that what you couldn’t burn, what you could never burn no matter how much you tried because the Web is cunning and subtle and _patient,_ won’t be enough to cause you serious problems later. The Web’s there. Secondary influence, Gerry would say, and they can’t say more than that. It’s always subtle, after all, until the point where it’s so well-entrenched that it doesn’t need to be subtle anymore. Gerry can’t track the patterns, can’t trace the strings.

Beyond that, there’s a little bit of Lonely, which really, Gerry can relate to, and a little bit of Desolation beyond what that knotted mass of scars on Jon’s hand can account for, and Gerry can relate to that as well. But… Archivist. What can you do, when your whole job is to get up close and personal with incidents of the eldritch connected with all of the other Entities? What are you even supposed to _do_ to avoid becoming entangled with everything that you might otherwise have never even interacted with even once? Gertrude had been like a kaleidoscope when Gerry met them. For as much as Mum set herself above the power struggles and the giving yourself to any one thing in particular, once Gerry gained the eyes to see it, once Gerry had committed the first major disappointment (just one of many, but they’ve learned to live with being a disappointment, even if they still wish—), they could see that no, Mum was not untouched by it all—Mum was not untouched at all.

You can’t go through life without being touched by something. Even if you never understand the nature of the world, even if you never come close to perceiving the world the way Gerry does, and honestly, Gerry isn’t certain that _anyone_ perceives the world the way they do, so you’re hardly starved for company in that category, you can’t go through life without being touched by at least one of the things that underpin the whole world. Even if it’s only one touch, even if it’s only fleeting, even if you’re only ever on the periphery of the incident that caused you to be touched, even if you never register what’s happening, you’ve still been touched. And to be someone who must deal with it all…

Yeah, none of this is surprising to Gerry. It’s right about what they expected, and they’ll put that away, now. It’s far from the most concerning thing. It’s far from the most interesting thing. It’s far from the thing that holds Gerry’s attention the most.

Gerry keeps right on looking at Jon, and Jon keeps right on looking through the rain-splattered windshield out at the road as if it’s offended him somehow, though he could just be looking out for cars, since there’s been a lot of other drivers who keep trying to merge into the lane right in front of them without putting on their turn indicators first, and that in the pouring rain could spell more trouble than either of them want to deal with on this interstate. Gerry keeps right on looking at Jon, and they sort of feel like smiling, but they also sort of feel like leaning over and trying to peel his skin back from his face, regardless of what that would do to Jon’s ability to drive the car speeding down the interstate at seventy miles an hour, regardless of how it would end.

There’s got to be something else. _Got_ to be. Gerry hadn’t been thinking of it in the moment, as they were heading down to the car, but there’s got to be something else. There’s always something else. Jon’s… Jon seems… Well, Gerry did tell Jon he could _call_ them ‘Gerry,’ and Gerry doesn’t feel like revoking it. They’ve never had someone to call them that before. Even if it wasn’t really earned, Gerry doesn’t want to go back. But there has to be something else, isn’t there?

The other shoe will drop. The other shoe always drops. But when Gerry sinks back into their seat, the armrest digging into their side and the glass of the passenger’s window so close to their face that they can practically feel the cool of the glass, even without pressing their cheek up against it, when Gerry actually stops to think about it, the other shoe probably won’t drop until they’re back in London. Jon’s… Gerry’s still trying to evaluate their intelligence, hasn’t really had long enough to come to any sort of conclusion that isn’t based on the snap judgments they know they shouldn’t stand by, even though they’ve already fallen into the trap of getting carried away with it once today, but one would _like_ to think that the guy who’s trying to stop a Stranger-based takeover of the whole damned world would have enough sense to wait until he’s back in his own seat of power before letting the other shoe drop.

The other shoe will drop, but it’s probably going to drop a lot later, once they’ve gotten out of here and there’s an ocean between them and the hunters. And Jon…

There’s another shoe that’s going to drop, but still, this was such a huge risk to take, and for what? Gerry’s got some skills, yeah, but their skillset isn’t _unique,_ and they don’t actually know all that much about the Unknowing or how anyone’s supposed to stop it. It was a huge risk to take for someone like Gerry. It was a huge risk to take for someone who, with every last double-edged gift the Beholding’s ever given them, couldn’t convince or compel the hunters not to kill someone, not even once. (Gerry sees dead eyes. They see dead eyes all the time, at the corners of their vision when their energy starts to flag and they lose their grip on exactly what day it is, and when exactly they last tried to sleep.) It’s not a risk that matches up with any reward Jon thinks he’s getting out of it, _whatever_ Jon thinks he might be getting out of it.

It was…

Gerry tries to remember if Gertrude ever risked herself for them. _Really_ risked herself. Offering to take Mum off of their hands and out of this world doesn’t really count; hindsight is clear as day, and hindsight shows that that was just what Gertrude had needed to do to make sure Gerry even _could_ follow after her on her long and circuitous quest to thwart a Stranger-based apocalypse. (They still… They still… They cried at night every night for weeks after Gertrude brought them back the book, showed them the burned and blackened remnants of pages close to the end, but not quite _at_ the end. Still don’t know why. Still couldn’t say a single word as to the character of the tears. They just know that they cried, again and again and again, until the night when Gertrude noticed, and then they stopped. She didn’t even say anything. Her noticing was enough to clam Gerry right up. It’s always more sensible to stop crying when somebody sees you doing it.)

And… and… Gerry really wishes they could find it in themselves to regret following Gertrude around on that quest of hers. It’s not like they had any vital part to play in stopping the Unknowing. Really, the whole time, Gerry was more of a tracker dog than anything else, and surely, _surely_ Gertrude could have found somebody else to play that part in her production. Hell, that’s probably what she decided to do when she hung up on them; after all, wouldn’t _you_ rather have a tracker dog that didn’t have a tumor growing like a bit of fungus on their brain?

They don’t. They don’t regret it. Maybe it’s because they actually care about this world, deep down, however little of it might actually be open and welcoming to something like them. Or maybe it’s because traveling around with Gertrude kept the Beholding nice and fed and relatively quiet in the back of Gerry’s head. Kept the crawling around down to a minimum. Or it could be both. Gerry can hope that it’s actually both.

Gertrude never really risked herself for them. On one level, Gerry gets it. She was the one with the plan, she was the one with the power and the pull to actually _do_ something to the Unknowing—Gerry’s read enough of the old accounts to know that you can’t stop an Entity’s agents from trying to pull off a ritual permanently, but you can definitely set them back a few centuries, and then try and make arrangements to ensure that those hostile agents will have to run a gauntlet of roadblocks to even try and get halfway to the point where they could try and pull off a ritual again. Gertrude was the one with the plan, and for whatever reason—maybe she thought Gerry would blab, though Gerry’s had the idea for a while that whatever part Gertrude intended _Gerry_ to play in foiling the Unknowing, if she had any part planned for them at all, was one that she thought it was better for them not to know about it until it was too late to back out; that would track with some of the other things Gertrude’s directed Gerry to do, and how she got them to do it—she’d never shared that plan with Gerry. That’s what people with plans do. They get people they can use as their tools, and send them out to do whatever needs doing. Gerry’s seen it reflected a thousand times in other ways elsewhere in their community, and they’ve had enough experience of it to know how it goes.

They’re not the one with the plan. They’re not the sort of person who makes plans. All they’re really fit for is being the tool that the people with plans uses to implement their plans. They were that with Mum, until they started chafing and chafing and Mum couldn’t decide whether to cut them completely loose and wipe her hands of them, or reel them further and further in, until there was no distance between them, until they were bonded so closely together that they might wind up literally attached at the hip. It was always the latter impulse that won out in the end, though, wasn’t it? Mum would never let Gerry go. Never. As long as she was around, in any way, shape, or form, living or something that was neither living or dead, she wasn’t content unless Gerry was standing right in her shadow, their shadows bound up too tight together to ever be disentangled. After all, Gerry was supposed to be the transmitter of Mum’s _legacy_ , and how were they supposed to do that if they were something that was wholly separate from her? How were they supposed to carry Mary Keay’s legacy on after she was gone if they were something other than her creature, something that ever held a thought in their head that hadn’t originally come from her?

Gerry didn’t want that. Gerry has never been able to tell exactly what they _do_ want, never had enough breathing room to figure out what exactly they want, but they know at least one thing they didn’t want, never wanted at all. Mum was never a very good mother. Gerry was never a very good child. They suited each other.

You don’t risk yourself for a tool. You send the tool out, and the tool either does what they’re supposed to do, or the tool doesn’t come back at all. If that happens, you go find yourself another tool, and get back to your plans. But still…

You know that thing a moment ago? Yeah, Gerry lied, though whether to themselves or to everyone else, they don’t know. There is something they know they want, and they’ve gotten it now, and don’t quite know what to do with it. Even if Jon looked at them and saw a tool, he must have _seriously_ overvalued Gerry as a potential tool to risk crossing the hunters on their behalf. And if not…

Later. The shoe’s not going to drop until they get back to London. And if… and if the shoe _doesn’t_ drop, it’s not gonna be clear that it isn’t there to drop until they get back to London. Gerry doesn’t have to think about it now. They’re not going to think about it now.

(They’re probably going to think about it now a _lot_. Just a little while later. Maybe once the rain has let up.)

But there’s something else nagging at them, something Gerry’s rather less willing to let go on without an answer until they get back to London.

The rain is picking up yet more, striking the car in waves not unlike the ocean waves you see smashing against the beaches further east during a particularly rough high tide. The car swerves a little sometimes, making Jon curse as he fights against the rivulets of water forming in the middle lane on this prime example of shitty American highways. Yes, Gerry is thinking about what’s going to happen if the car breaks down or if it hydroplanes so badly that they veer straight into another car, even if the hunters _haven’t_ gotten back to the hotel room, noticed their long-captive’s flight, and grabbed a car of their own. Gerry’s never actually been in a car accident before, but they’ve been shuttled in cars up and down these American arteries for long enough to have seen… Hell, they stopped counting after the fiftieth. They’re not close to any major city out here; Gerry doesn’t think they’re close to a real city, period. You could get yourself a tow truck out here… if you can actually get a signal on your phone. If not, then it’s all down to counting on a police car to actually stop when they see you broken down on the side of the road, and honestly, given some of the American cops Gerry’s run into, and given the whiff of bloodlust, of rage, of heart-thumping-blood-racing-chase-chase-chase they’ve smelled on their breath a _lot_ of the time, maybe give that a miss?

Gerry’s thinking about that, but their curiosity is thinking for them to a larger degree than they like to admit to most of the times, except to themselves. Who likes to tell people that their brain’s so intertwined with a voyeuristic eye god that they can’t keep their questions to themselves sometimes? Not Gerry, and honestly, most of the time, they’re talking to people whose opinion they couldn’t care less about, but still, they don’t like to admit it? It’s easier to handle being at somebody’s beck and call when you can actually look at and talk to that somebody, when it’s somebody whose wishes you can actually learn to anticipate.

Whatever. They’re curious; they’re going to ask. Jon probably won’t tear his eyes off of the road for a single moment while they ask, and that’s just fine. Gerry doesn’t really want Jon looking at them while they ask; being somebody who’s got the Beholding crawling around inside his head too, and probably a lot _more_ than Gerry does, maybe Jon will just be able to tell that Gerry’s letting the crawling thing have a bit more free rein than they ought. They just met Jon. They just met Jon, and unlike Gertrude, Jon hasn’t just ripped Mum out of the skin book and burned all of her pages and stricken her account and her memory from the face of the earth. (Her memory. Hah. That’s rich.) Gerry doesn’t think they could bear up under Jon’s judgment gracefully at such an early point in their acquaintance. Even if they do let Jon call them ‘Gerry.’ Honestly, that might make it worse.

While Jon’s focused on the road, so focused that really, Gerry’s got no guarantee that Jon will even hear them talking, and no, that is not deliberate, they just blurt out, “How’d you find out about me anyways?”

‘And don’t say _Beholding_ ,’ dangles on the tip of their tongue, but as soon as it tries to get out of their mouth, they swallow it down again. Gertrude’s dead; Jon’s the Archivist. It’s practically his _job_ to get the Beholding to tell him things, in exchange for feeding the creeping, crawling thing just outside the boundaries of reality that seeps in through the little holes the books provide and through whatever other invisible tears Gerry can’t ever make out with their own more limited sight. It’s practically his job, and why should Gerry be choosy about what brought Jon to them? Beggars can’t be choosers, can they?

And…

…And there’s something…

Most people would probably say there’s something wrong with Gerry for even thinking this, those people who don’t perceive the world the same way Gerry does, and maybe even some of those who do (if any such exist), those who still cling to the belief that maybe, just maybe, they can will it all away if they just try hard enough. (A note: if wishes were horses, beggars would ride, but wishes are _not_ horses, and you aren’t going to ride on something that isn’t there.) But when _Gerry_ reflects on it, there’s almost something comforting about the idea that the Beholding might have led Jon to Gerry. Even if it’s only leading someone to a useful tool for their own purposes, the idea that they might make enough of an impression upon the intangible fabric of the thing that’s bound itself so tightly to the both of them that they could never pull it out if they tried, that someone else who was bound to that thing too, but had never met Gerry themselves, could still see their impression in the fabric, could still catch hints of their life, enough to track them down and try to bring them back into the fold, it’s… it’s nice. Gerry so often feels like a ghost trapped in mortal flesh, more like a creature of the End, like one of the people Mum’s occasionally called up from the skin book, than a human-creature bound to the Eye. The idea that there’s some way they might not perish in the memories of man isn’t all that bad, is it?

But just then, a scarlet tractor-trailer pulls out _way too fucking close_ in front of them, and Jon slams on the brakes and that proves insufficient and he jolts the car into the right-hand lane and they spend a _lot_ of time screaming and a lot of time coughing and catching their breath after they’ve finished screaming, and by the time that’s done, they’ve both forgotten all about it.


	4. Chapter Four

Jon hates driving in the rain. Jon _really_ hates driving in the rain. Alright, so part of that is down to his own inexperience. He took the driving test when he was in school, but even though he has a license, he’s never owned a car of his own—too expensive, too impractical where parking’s at a premium and honestly, it’s quicker just to get on the tube or _walk_ if you want to get somewhere, isn’t it? Quicker and better for the environment and less expensive because if you don’t have a car, you don’t have to _pay_ for the car, and you don’t have to pay for insurance or fuel, either. The few cars Jon has driven in his life consist entirely of cars driven under the close supervision of instructors, or beat-up rentals when he’s had to go out of town on business or vacation. One of his instructors called him a nervous driver, and there’s more truth in that than the instructor really knew.

It’s rather hard to be _calm_ about driving in a metal death trap while surrounded by dozens of other metal death traps, being driven by people who aren’t aware of the fact that they’re driving metal death traps, and instead seem to think they’re absolutely _invincible_. Add in the fact that the speed limit on this interstate is seventy miles an hour and that seems to be more of a suggestion for nearly everyone else on the road right now than a rule, and his resting state of anxiety doesn’t particularly feel like it’s resting anymore. Add in the _other_ fact that it’s pouring down rain, so hard that even with the windshield wipers set to the highest setting Jon can’t see more than about fifteen feet in front of him (the interior of the windshield keeps fogging up; that does _not_ help matters), and that this hasn’t dampened the other drivers’ need for speed even _slightly_ , and suddenly Jon understands a lot better how people can have heart attacks before hitting forty.

He’s found that storms come on quickly on the highways, more quickly than he would have expected, more quickly than he remembers from the days when his only contact with transportation was public transportation, or else his own feet. The storms come on more quickly, and once they come, they rage with a fury Jon finds frankly unsettling. Sometimes he thinks that might be his own perceptions changing as he…

But that’s entirely too fanciful, too flowery, too much like something he does not care to think about as he’s driving down a busy interstate in a battered rental car with Gerard Keay, of all people, sitting in the passenger’s seat.

Gerry. They prefer Gerry. Or maybe they don’t prefer Gerry especially, but still, that’s what they asked Jon to call them. Better to think of them as Gerry, so that he doesn’t slip up and call them by a name they seem not to prefer. Maybe.

Alright, so it makes Jon a little jittery to think of calling them by a nickname. That’s between himself _and_ himself, and no one else needs to know about it.

Gerry’s been quiet since they left town and got on the interstate. Maybe they think of the rain in the same way that Jon does, when it leaves them stuck in a tiny metal death trap surrounded by adverse weather and drives who think they’re invincible, and if that’s the case, Jon _completely_ understands. These circumstances don’t exactly make _him_ chatty, either. God, in circumstances like these, his last words, his very _last_ words on the face of this earth could be something like ‘So, did you hear about the new Moroccan takeaway that’s opened up?’, and who wants their last words to be something like _that_? Jon’s had a lot of time to think about last words, considering all of the times he’s been in situations where it seemed all too likely that he’d be running out of last words very soon. He still hasn’t struck upon anything he’s happy with. He just knows that he does _not_ want his last words to possess even the slightest resemblance to small talk.

Some of the statements also just gave Jon the impression that Gerry’s a naturally quiet person. There are thoughts trying to press in on his mind, little bits and pieces of information trying to reveal themselves to him, whispering _don’t you want to know why? Don’t you want context for that_?, but Jon can’t catch hold of them. He’s not trying hard enough to catch them, or else it’s something yet beyond his power, or both, really. He shouldn’t be trying. Shouldn’t be trying for voyeurism, not more than what he’s already reached for and found.

They barely know each other. Gerry’s had a very… a very trying time, and though ‘trying’ has to be the absolute least of it, it’s hard to make his mind focus on the whole thing long enough to try and reach for a word to more adequately describe the kind of _time_ Gerry’s hard for long enough for their hair to grow into that ratty braid that sits limp against their left side even now. Gerry’s had a very trying time, for a long time, and now that they’re finally free of it, they must be taking the time to gather their thoughts. Process it, come to terms with it, and all of the other buzzwords and buzz-phrases a therapist might use with Jon, if Jon ever went to see a therapist. (God, where would he even _start_? There’s no place he can start that won’t end with him sectioned, surely, and that’s not a solution, not a solution at all. Just lying about everything so he doesn’t end up being sectioned isn’t really a solution, either.) They barely know each other. Whatever process Gerry is trying to go through in the confines of their own mind, it makes perfect sense that they would not wish to involve Jon.

Jon doesn’t find the quiet worrying. Jon doesn’t wonder what it is going through Gerry’s mind at this very moment. Jon’s gaze does _not_ keep sliding over to where Gerry sits, only to snap back to the road when a stray noise from outside this latest metal death trap in his possession renews his knowledge of his own mortality and the fact that he neither wants to die so quickly, or drag somebody else down with him. His skin does not prickle when he can feel Gerry looking at him, no matter how long or how piercing Gerry’s stare might be.

(That stare was… You might laugh, but before Jon even fully understood just who it was he was looking at in that dim, dingy hotel room, Gerry’s stare had been striking. Elias has a stare a little like that, one usually employed when a subordinate has done something contrary to his purposes, but Gerry’s stare didn’t put Jon’s hackles up the way Elias’s even _looking_ at him does these days. Oh, yes, the fact that Gerry had been a stranger, and had been a stranger whom Jon had not immediately recognized as someone he had read so much about, someone he had wanted for months, _years_ now to know more about, maybe had something to do with that. It had been the stare of someone who was trying very hard to figure out just who they had been presented with, yes, and given how quickly Gerry’s attention had jumped to Jon’s lighter, Jon supposed that trying to figure out where his, where his _allegiances_ lied had played no small part in what Gerry was trying to discern about him. And given some of the things he’d gotten the impression that Gerry could do, maybe there was something there that some people—or a lot of people—would have considered untoward. But Jon never felt threatened by it. He still doesn’t feel threatened by it. Maybe it’s just like recognizing like. Maybe not.)

Jon has enough to worry about without adding Gerry into the mix, at least for the moment. Gerry’s convinced that if the hunters catch up to them, there’s going to be hell to pay for it, but honestly, if they both get killed in some sort of pile-up on the interstate while it’s still pouring down rain and Jon can’t see further than fifteen feet in front of him, they’re not even going to have to worry about the hunters. There’s probably not a whole lot that either Trevor or Julia can do with two corpses so badly mangled that the only way anyone could ever hope to identify them is by their dental records. One thing at a time. Whatever it is that Gerry’s planning to do to “deal” with them (another thing that Jon’s trying not to think about, how lovely; he can only hope that the weight of everything he’s trying not to think about won’t be enough to break his mind wide open for everyone to pick, or something like that), that likely won’t be an issue until they’re back in London. If it’s not uncommon for the two of them to go off for days at a time, it’s entirely possible that Jon and Gerry could already be back in London by the time they realize that there’s anything amiss. He’s not going to worry about it until they’re back in London. He’s _not_.

Eventually, blessedly, the rain stops, though the sky is not exactly the sparkling fresh-washed blue Jon likes best to see just after a rainstorm, especially one of the caliber he’s just spent the last hour and a half driving through. Instead, the sky is still just as gray, just as dismal as it was in the minutes before the storm started, when those clouds came up so incredibly, alarmingly quickly, a clear threat for anyone who has the eyes to see it. The asphalt doesn’t sparkle as it might after a rainstorm, if the sun was actually able to shone down upon it. Instead, it just gleams dully with the rivulets of water still pouring downhill. The deep ditch off to the right-hand side of the highway looks rather more like a creek, and if it starts to rain again, even a little bit, that creek might well swell to a river. Jon’s not certain how much more it would take for that creek-turned-river to burst its banks and turn the highway itself into a river. He’d like to get off of this highway and onto another one before he’s put in the position of finding out. (Drowning sounds like a horrible way to die.)

So it could start raining again at any time. Whatever. Really, whatever. Jon can’t control the weather. So long as the driving conditions are even remotely favorable, he’s going to keep on driving, and not worry about the rain.

The day wears on, and finally, around noon, there’s something else that’s starting to bother him, something considerably more difficult to ignore.

Jon… can’t actually remember the last time he ate something. Definitely some time yesterday, but yesterday was… chaotic, and Jon can’t remember if the last meal was supper or lunch. Regardless, it would have been a short, abbreviated meal; neither Trevor nor Julia seem to need much food (or, at least, they don’t seem to need much food when they haven’t recently been on an especially strenuous ‘hunt’; Jon suddenly finds himself entertaining thoughts on the eating habits of predators, and tries to think of something else), and neither of them seem to think much about the fact that there are other people who need more food than they do. Jon’s never been a particularly heavy eater, and _yes_ , he has been known to skip meals when engrossed in a particularly fascinating piece of research; a lot of his early days in the Institute saw one of his new coworkers trying to slip him food from the staffroom, and there was even one occasion when Martin had found him—

He’s not going to think about that now. The weight of the things he’s not thinking about gets a little heavier, but Jon’s not going to think about that now.

But either way, yesterday was definitely the last time Jon had anything to eat. Adrenaline might have been spurring him on earlier, but it’s not there to buoy him anymore, and will only dissipate further and further the more the day wears on.

Oh, a convenient road sign—the nearest exit is five miles away, and oh, _look_ at the array of fast food restaurants available at that exit. There might even be something _edible_ there.

Jon doesn’t expect this to provoke an argument.

But then, what he’s known of Gerard Keay, he’s learned from secondhand accounts. He’s known _Gerry_ for less than a day.

The moment Jon makes the suggestion, Gerry balks. Face screwed up, they shake their head violently. “What? Jon, we’ve _got_ to keep moving.”

“Why?” Jon asks, just a little testily. His stomach grumbles wholehearted agreement.

Gerry’s face screws up a little more, their shoulders straightening and stiffening as if pressed straight by a vise. “Once they figure out I’m gone, they’ll be on us like flies on a corpse. We can’t stop moving until _nightfall_ , at least; Julia gets kinda weird after dark, it’ll slow them down.”

“I can’t _go_ that long without stopping; I—“

“You’re gonna have to if you don’t want them cracking your skull open like an egg. You really want to find out if those two like skull omelets for breakfast?” Voices gets faster and higher, almost cracking, eyes bright and sparking, that does look like panic now, doesn’t it? Looks like the panic in Michael’s barely-eyes just before he-it-they unraveled like light spooling into the drain of night, except now there’s a light in the drain, a light so catching and compelling that it speaks of the never-end like it’s a promise and not a threat. “Because they’ll do that and they’ll make me watch, and maybe _you’ll_ be watching if you’re—“

Whatever that ‘you’re’ is supposed to lead up to, Jon cuts Gerry off before they can get there. (It feels safer. He knows it isn’t. It feels safer, and Jon’s gotten used to what feels better and what’s actually okay not correlating even remotely.) “Gerry, I haven’t eaten since yesterday. _You_ haven’t eaten since yesterday.”

And Jon doesn’t know exactly the reasoning behind the suspicion that suddenly seizes him, but then, completely uncaring of the road for one terrifying and glorious moment, he turns to Gerry, fully to Gerry, no longer looking at him out of the corner of his eye but dead-on, and squints. “Did you actually eat anything yesterday?”

He doesn’t know if it’s a compulsion. He can’t feel the difference, never can, for all that he can tell the difference immediately now, once he gets even the slightest look at the expression on the face of whoever he was speaking to at the time. Actually, Jon doesn’t know how to avoid it, avoid compelling somebody by accident, except to just find some way to never phrase things as a direct question ever again. (Actually, Jon’s not always certain that he _wants_ to find a sure-fire way of not compelling someone by accident. He’s spent years being lied to, spent years never being given a straight answer. The idea that there’s a way for him to _force_ people to tell him the truth is a heady one, indeed. He’s not certain he wants to give it up.)

Jon doesn’t know if it’s a compulsion. Asides from Elias, he doesn’t know if there’s actually anyone who can _resist_ it, and how much it would take. But Gerry doesn’t answer Jon. Not in words, anyways. Instead, Gerry abruptly yanks their head to the right, staring determinedly out of the window as their body sinks so far into the seat that Jon would swear they were shrinking if he couldn’t see their legs sliding out from under them, folding up beneath the glove compartment.

No, Gerry hasn’t answered Jon in words. At this point, that seems rather unnecessary.

“You, you didn’t, did you?” Suddenly, almost absurdly, Jon can feel anger bubbling in his stomach like boiling water, so blisteringly hot that he expects the steam that must be pouring from his mouth to fog up his glasses and the windshield both. “Do they _seriously_ just leave you in a hotel room for days at a time without food, and just, just expect you to _stay_ there?!”

Gerry titters, a high, discordant sound like someone running their fingernails hard against violin strings. “Really? Everything they’ve done, and _that’s_ what you get hung up on? Everything they’ve done to everybody else, and you get hung up on what they’ve done to _me_?”

Forget breathing steam, Jon feels like he could just breathe _fire_ , and for a moment, just a moment, he’s imagining two particular faces melting like candle wax, dripping tallow fat onto the grass the way Jude’s face dripped once, except this time, their faces wouldn’t form back up into shapes even remotely resembling the ones they started with. The rage should feel like something that came from outside. It doesn’t. It doesn’t feel like that at all, for all that it feels about as organic and as comfortable as if somebody dropped a burning coal directly into his stomach.

“ _They’re_ not here,” he grinds out, when at last he can say anything at all. “ _You_ are.”

Gerry blinks at his anger, confusion written all over their pale face, strong enough to momentarily put aside the light-at-the-bottom-of-the-drain panic in their eyes. “That wasn’t a normal thing. When they’re going to be away for days at a time, they usually went for food before, or sent me out instead, when they needed someone whose face wasn’t plastered all over the wanted posters—“ their mouth twists, not a smile, in no way a smile “—people who get brought back to me aren’t allowed to go around spreading stories about me. Except for you. With them, longest I’ve gone without food before now’s about two days, and we were all out in the mountains for that.” Suddenly, they roll their eyes, an expression that seems almost normal, though the panic is starting to seep back in. “Finally had to raid a chicken coop out at some shack in the middle of nowhere. But they’re not gonna be stopping to do stuff like that now, _trust_ me.”

“And you can trust _me_ —“ he’s still angry; he can come back to that later “—when I tell you that if I drive this car for much longer, we’re going to be in the ditch, if not buried in the backseat of someone _else’s_ car. Leaving aside that the fuel tank is hardly inexhaustible. Can _you_ drive a car?” he asks pointedly. “If I get too tired, can you drive the car instead?”

And once again, Gerry’s silence is absolutely _resounding_.

But it’s Gerry who speaks first, once the moment passes. “We don’t go more than a couple of miles off of the interstate to find food.” They speak in the clipped tones of a military commander speaking orders, a tone that doesn’t suit them at all, and even less so for how soft their voice still is, now that they’re not nearly-shouting, how the gentleness Jon had grown accustomed to in the hotel room seeps back in so easily. How does somebody even sound clipped and gentle at the same time? “We go through the drive-through, and we eat our food in the car. You will _not_ turn the engine off while we’re eating, but keep the doors locked and the windows up. We won’t go inside.” Jon raises an eyebrow at that, but before he can say anything, Gerry seems to get the gist. Their pale face flushes a dull red. “If you need to go inside, we go inside together. Neither one of us go anywhere alone until we’re walking off of a plane. If they find you, they could kill you before you even knew they were there.” Gerry starts to grind their teeth, the movements of their jaw visible through their wan, stretched skin. “They won’t. Not unless they’ve already found me. But they could. They could be on you before you even noticed. This isn’t a game.”

No, but those are quite a _lot_ of restrictions, and Jon’s ready to argue about at least some of them, not least the fact that in his (admittedly limited) experience, the fast-food restaurants closest to the highway tend to have the worst food—maybe it’s the gasoline fumes emanating from the roads? (Probably not, but Jon doesn’t exactly have an answer that makes any more sense than that.) Anyways, Jon’s ready to argue about half of those points, until he notices something.

The heat these past few days has been so close and so sticky that Jon’s half-expected to see flies stuck to his skin, squirming feebly in a vain attempt to escape what must surely be their death. Today has been no exception, and Jon turned the air conditioning very nearly all the way up pretty much the moment they got into the car. The air conditioning has been blasting at seventy degrees since just before sunrise, and yet, when Jon pauses, in the moment when he’s sucking in a breath for another retort, he catches a whiff of sour sweat.

A strong whiff.

Jon doesn’t think he could discern a sweat stain on Gerry’s unbuttoned button-up shirt if he tried, let alone on their undershirt. Both look like they might have once been black, but have since faded to a shade of gray Jon doesn’t really have a name for, not least because depending on what part of the button-down or the undershirt you’re looking at, it’s a different shade of gray. There are an assortment of old stains and tears on those clothes, besides; anything new would have absolutely no hope of standing out. But the smell is telltale enough; Jon’s smelled it many times before, though he’s usually smelling it coming off of his own body, or if not, in the cool quiet of his office (Melanie had been sweating buckets the whole time, the first time she showed up in the Institute, though she never acknowledged it, and would probably deny it now, if asked).

Stress sweat has an unmistakable odor, and Jon…

Gerry’s staring at him intently, waiting for Jon to assent or to let out that retort that had been on the tip of his tongue just a moment before. He can’t find the retort, now, and he has no intention of talking. Not just yet.

Every time Jon read about Gerard Keay in one of the statements he dug out of the absolute chaos that was the boxes and boxes of statements left unrecorded, they had seemed so cool, so collected. The closest they had ever come to unraveling was when they were interrogating Andrea Nunis on whether or not she had anyone close to her whose memory she could hold onto when she collided with her close encounter with the… Jon supposes it was the Lonely that nearly claimed her for its own, judging by the way Gerry described it.

( _“Do you have a mother? Do you love her_?” clings to the surface of Jon’s mind. He doesn’t know why. It sits on his mind like a barnacle clinging to one of the beams holding up a pier, and will not let him be comfortable.)

But those were secondhand accounts, and Jon has only known Gerry for less than a day. Gerry is not the more-than-human being Jon made them out to be. Gerry is entirely human, with all the frailties that come with it, and Gerry has had a very, a very _trying_ time. Gerry’s had a very trying time, and whose fault is that?

The anger that had before died down to a low simmer is starting to bubble again in Jon’s stomach. Gerry is absolutely, unwaveringly adamant that if the hunters catch up with them, there’s nothing Jon can do to stop them from doing what they choose to do. Maybe they’re right. No, they’re certainly right. There’s nothing Jon can do, if that happens. There’s little Jon’s ever been able to do, when that, when that’s happened. But if there’s nothing else to do, if all he can do is be a warm body standing between Gerry and those who want to drag them back into the life Jon found them living (if you can even call that a life at all), then he’ll be that warm body. He’ll be that extra five seconds of lead time as Gerry breaks into a run, if he has to be that. It probably won’t do anything, in the end; Jon hasn’t had a very good track record of actually being able to do something. But it’s still something.

This… probably isn’t a normal way to think of someone he’s known for less than a day. Jon’s never been on the run with someone before. The last time he was on the run, he was on the run by himself. He’s not certain what the rules are. If there are rules. Actually, if there are rules for this sort of scenario, the rulebook must be absolutely surreal to read. Picky reader he might be when it’s for something personal, but Jon thinks he might actually pick that rulebook up and read it cover to cover without tossing it out first, if only to see if there’s a rule about who sleeps on the floor if there’s only one bed in the safehouse.

When Jon at last lets out a breath, it’s long, and slow, and without the heat he expected it to possess just a few moments before. “Alright. Alright, Gerry. But we have to stop for petrol somewhere after we’ve finished eating. We’re almost out.”

Tension flooding out of their body like air escaping out of a balloon, Gerry nods. “I could never run fast enough to get away from them.” They look Jon over critically. “And I’ve got longer legs than you.”

Which is to say that Jon would be tackled to the ground in moments. And _yes_ , he already knew that. Trevor and Julia are both… He’d not expected either of them to be so tall. Trevor Herbert’s reputation is that of the friendly tramp, and you don’t imagine a man who looks like he could heft a dining table over his head when you imagine that. Perhaps with Julia, Jon should have been expecting it, considering that her father was absolutely massive himself, but Julia’s almost as tall as _Daisy_ , and really, who expects to meet another woman as tall or nearly as tall as Daisy? Who expects to meet _anyone_ who’s as tall or nearly as tall as Daisy? No one with a typical idea of how tall people are, that’s who.

Jon supposes he could be insulted by the implication. But it’s hard to escape the implication that Gerry’s agitation seems to be just as much on Jon’s behalf as on their own. And it’s just for a couple of days. Just until they get back to London. If neither Trevor nor Julia have passports or visas, and they’re really so eager to avoid deportation, it’s going to be a while before they have to worry about either of them tracking them down back home If it gives Gerry a little peace of mind, Jon thinks he can handle being hypervigilant for a couple of days.

So they pull off at that exit, and start hunting for somewhere to eat.

Gerry straightens a little in their seat as they pull into the parking lot of an Arby’s, tilting their head to the side just a hair and frowning. “I think I’ve been here before.”

“What? When?”

“With Gertrude,” Gerry explains, staring at the sign as if they expect it to come to life and wave at them. “She complained about the food the whole time we were here, but when I looked away from my plate, I looked back and saw her stealing my chips.” They sound almost offended as they go on, “She had a full plate of her own, but she just _had_ to keep going after mine.”

A jitter of incredulous laughter rattles in Jon’s mouth. Well, that’s another image of Gertrude he now has to reconcile with all the _other_ contradictory images of Gertrude he has in his head. Somehow, between ‘harmless old lady’, ‘stopper of apocalypses,’ and ‘will literally feed someone to an Entity to stop an apocalypse,’ he now has to contend with ‘chip thief.’ Truly, she contained multitudes. “And…” Well, this feels like poking a sleeping lion, for some reason. “And what did you do when you caught her?”

Gerry shrugs jerkily, waving their hands in the air. “What was I _supposed_ to do? _Stop_ her? She didn’t eat _all_ of my chips; once she realized I was watching she just sort of… sort of dropped the chips back on my plate.” Gerry waves their left hand so wildly that they knock it against the upholstered ceiling of the car; grimacing, they let the hand fall back into their lap. “She just acted like nothing had happened! Sometimes I wonder if I _hallucinated_ that. I mean, it’s not like I didn’t already have the tumor; can those make you hallucinate?”

Jon’s going to skirt right around the subject of Gerry’s tumor for right now. That’s not something he wants to think about while he’s eating, let alone when he’s eating what is no doubt going to turn out to be a very greasy lunch. It sounds like just the sort of thing to give him indigestion, and he doesn’t… he really doesn’t want to think about the surgery. Thinking about the surgery while he’s eating sounds like a good way to give him something a bit stronger than indigestion. It would certainly hurt more than indigestion.

Maybe because the skies still look like they’re threatening rain, or maybe because they just got lucky, they don’t have too long to wait at the drive-through. It’s probably the latter; this is a busy interstate they’ve been driving down, after all. And no, Jon’s not interested in entertaining the possibility that this Arby’s just has a reputation as a shitty place to eat. He’d like to at least try to enter into eating his meal with an open mind. Whatever, they don’t have long to wait, and Gerry even decides that _they_ don’t have to wait until Jon’s found an open parking spot, because the moment, the very moment Jon hands their bag to them, they descend upon it like a… Jon doesn’t know the most appropriate Biblical reference for this, doesn’t even really understand why his mind went there in the first place. Like a swarm of locusts, he supposes? Anyways, Jon’s not certain Gerry’s even _chewing_ their chips before swallowing them. It would be more accurate to call what they’re doing _inhaling,_ rather than eating. So much for Gerry acting like they’re not hungry.

Himself, hungry as he is, and the smell of his sandwich, beef and grease and caramelized onions and a generous amount of garlic, only whets the appetite, regardless of what the sandwich might actually taste like, Jon starts on his own lunch considerably more slowly. He’s reached the point of hunger where he’s so hungry that he’s starting to feel kind of sick, starting to feel like maybe food would be a bad idea, for all that food is the only solution that won’t make the problem worse. The first bite goes down hard; the first bite makes his stomach churn and ache and twinge as if he just swallowed a mouthful of steel wool. But after a few moments, that sick feeling is gone and Jon can eat without any difficulty, so eat he does.

Not that there aren’t some unwelcome stray thoughts coming to the surface of his mind.

“You would really think I would have stopped eating meat by now,” Jon mutters, as he takes yet another bite of his sandwich. The meat does not oblige him by suddenly tasting spoiled or slimy. Furthermore, neither does the meat oblige him by starting to wriggle around or grow eyes or make noises or bleed uncontrollably or do any of the things that eldritch meat seems to do, in his experience. He can recall vividly reading accounts where meat long since separated from its original body and cooked to perfection did such things, and yet, he can eat this sandwich and feel absolutely no aversion. There _has_ to be something wrong with him—well, beyond the obvious. “Everything I’ve read about meat, and I can still eat it.”

Beside him, Gerry shrugs. They ordered… Jon honestly can’t tell with them, if they ordered an especially large meal, or if it’s just that the portion sizes are quite large to start with. A mass of chicken fingers and chips, an amount of food actually not all that dissimilar in size to the meal Jon wound up with, an amount of food that Jon would never have considered trying to eat in one sitting if not for how long it’s been since he last ate anything at all, and Gerry’s all but demolished their own meal. It would be kind of amazing, if it wasn’t a testament to how long it’s been since _they_ last ate anything.

Gerry shrugs, and, having apparently filled the hole in their stomach enough that they no longer feel compelled to inhale their food, chews the last bit of their second-last chicken tender before answering him. “It’s just food; I wouldn’t worry about it too much. The Vast could ruin the sky for you, but you’d still have to go out under it to live your life.”

“I… I suppose you have a point.” Jon still feels as if there’s something wrong with him. He half-expects to look out the driver-side window and see a cow staring accusingly at him. To distract from that, he levels a long, faintly amused (though not really) look at the remains of Gerry’s lunch. “We can get more food, if you like.”

Another shrug. “Maybe. We’ll see.”

Having started earlier and eaten a lot more quickly than Jon, Gerry finishes their meal first. Rather than repeating past deeds and swiping a few of Jon’s chips—there would be some strange symmetry in that, though Jon isn’t certain he’s comfortable with it, either the symmetry or the chip-stealing—Gerry stuffs the leftover cardstock (cardstock? It certainly feels like cardstock) packets their food came in back in the paper bag and sinks back down into their set, staring straight ahead, hands pressed flat against the canvas of their bag. They look almost like a doll when they do that, a long-limbed, oversized doll that’s been put back on its shelf for the moment, and turned away.

Jon doesn’t like the comparison, personally. He would have sooner his mind hadn’t gone there, but there’s little to be done about it _now_. Something that will go away on closer acquaintance, he hopes, though their acquaintance is so uneven and irregular that Jon’s not certain how long that will take.

But the point of the matter here is that Jon has had to deal with sapient dolls before, and he’s not looking forward to the occasion when he inevitably has to deal with them again. At all. (A month. A month he spent with Nikola, and her, her _lotion_. It feels like a lot longer. It feels like he spent his whole life there. He doesn’t want… But it doesn’t matter what he wants. It hasn’t mattered for a long time.) He’ll thank his mind to stop trying to supply him with images of Gerry as a sapient doll. They’re not welcome.

“Hey, Jon?”

Gerry’s soft voice, a little softer now than it had been in the hotel room, actually (probably has fresh application of food and water to thank for that, and Jon doesn’t typically want to strangle people, but he’s been feeling a lot of violent urges he doesn’t often feel as of late, and by _sheer coincidence_ , all of them are directed at the same two people), reels Jon back in from his own unpleasant reveries. Jon looks up and over, and Gerry’s staring at them with their wide, dark eyes. Jon’s finally looking at them in proper daylight, in a situation where he won’t have to tear his gaze away in just a moment to make sure he isn’t about to hit another car or a motorcyclist. In proper daylight, when he can look at Gerry’s eyes properly, he can see that they aren’t actually black, as he had thought. Instead, they look to be a very, very dark shade of gray, a darker gray than is common for human eyes; Jon thinks he’s read somewhere that gray eyes are supposed to just be blue eyes with less melanin, though he could be wrong. It’s an interesting color. He could look at it more, if the eye contact didn’t feel just a little bit like being scoured. (There’s probably some irony in there somewhere. He’s not going to go looking for it.)

It’s not appropriate to just stare into someone’s eyes without responding to them, so eventually, Jon unsticks his mouth and asks: “What is it?”

A little slowly, as if operating on time running a few seconds slow, Gerry tears their gaze away from his face and directs instead towards his hand. The scarred hand. Well, actually, both of Jon’s hands have scars on them, but only one of them looks like it consists entirely of livid red scar tissue with fingernails that did _eventually_ grow back, but definitely didn’t grow back looking the way they ought. That hand.

It’s… not uncommon for Jon to find people staring at that hand. It’s a little less common to find people staring at his hand with their eyes narrowed and brow furrowed, as if they’re trying to read something very small written on the skin. It’s novel, actually, novel enough that Jon doesn’t find himself bristling or cringing under this stare the way he would the _other_ stares he’s gotten regarding his hand.

“Those…” Gerry’s brows knit a little more. “Those look fresh.”

“They look _raw_ ,” Jon corrects them sourly. “They still _feel_ raw sometimes.”

Gerry mutters something unintelligible under their breath, but that sounds very much like it’s punctuated with more than a little profanity. When they raise their voice enough to actually be heard clearly, though they’re still muttering, it’s to say, “That sounds about right. Can I…”

They point to his hand. Jon notes, just a little resentfully, that _Gerry’s_ fingernails look completely normal. But resentment is soon washed away by a wave of guilt. Gerry’s burn scars aren’t quite as thick, no; the same livid shade of red, despite being years old, but not as thick. But Jon has hardly forgotten reading about how Gerry got those scars in the first place. There’s the rim of the scars, laced in a perfectly straight line around halfway up their neck, and then, everywhere below that point that isn’t marked out by an eye tattoo is just covered in scar tissue. The scar tissue on Gerry’s hands and neck hasn’t faded even slightly in the several years it’s been since they picked up those burns in the first place; there’s no reason to assume that any of the _other_ scars have faded, either. So every inch of Gerry’s body, past that neat line on their neck, every inch of skin that does not have an eye tattoo on it, is just covered in burn scars. And if they feel even remotely like Jon’s scars…

He proffers his hand. He’s eaten enough of his sandwich that he can eat it one-handed without risking everything inside spilling out. Not that Jon thinks he’s going to be eating a whole lot while Gerry’s doing whatever it is they’re doing.

And then, Gerry just takes his hand in both of theirs, poking and prodding gently at it with their fingertips. It’s a little awkward, whatever it is they’re trying to do. Their hands are larger than Jon’s, though thinner, long and spindly with long, spindly fingers. They don’t seem at all clumsy, not the way Jon’s hand feels clumsy, those fingers every bit as deft as they must have been before their close encounter with the man who was probably Diego Molina. But then, the scars aren’t as thick, and Gerry’s had longer to recover from it. Jon watches those hands work with something close to fascination, wishing, absurdly, that he could actually feel them properly as the fingertips work on his skin.

Gerry pauses, pale, thin face screwed up in concentration. Finally, they ask, in a voice so far away Jon could almost believe they were sitting miles apart, “Desolation?”

It takes Jon a moment to connect that one. He’s had names for all of them for less than twelve hours, and ‘desolation’ means something rather different to him than the Cult of the Lightless Flame’s apparent mission statement. But Jude’s smirking candlewax face bobs to the forefront of his mind, eyes dancing with terrible anticipation as she holds out one of her candlewax, ever-so-slightly misshapen hands. Remembered pain seizes him for just a moment. Once his vision has cleared and he’s finished swallowing down the bile, he nods.

Gerry favors him with an odd little smile. There’s no humor in it, but no hostility, either. It never reaches their eyes, but at least it’s not the ghastly, feral rictus that painted their mouth too-wide and too-bright for one horrible moment back in the hotel. “So’re mine.” They take one of their hands away from Jon’s, fiddling with their crumpled collar so that more of their scarred neck is visible. “Mine are all over, except for where these things—“ and now, they hold their hand so that their knuckles and the little jutting bone in the wrist, and the staring tattoos that adorn the only unscarred patches of skin to be found there, are front and center “—sit.”

Jon knows. He says nothing. He tries not to look too long at the tattoos. Their shape is very basic, not something that could ever be mistaken for real eyes. An oval with sharp ends, and set inside is a dark pupil ringed by a colorless iris. They could never be mistaken for real eyes. Jon still expects something to happen when he looks at them, though he doesn’t yet know what.

And Gerry, too, pauses to regard their tattoos with something very close to ambivalence. “Wasn’t actually expecting that. Far as I knew, they were just ink I put on my skin so people would stop getting ideas.” Their eyes glaze over, and the murmur, one so quiet Jon has to strain to hear it, but still manages to catch: “…first time’s usually just an accident. Something somebody did, and didn’t expect to work out the way it did.” Their eyes clear, voice tips back up to normal. “It was a few years back. There were rumors going around that somebody in the Cult of the Lightless Flame had gotten their hands on a Leitner. If it was anybody, then probably Molina; he was one of Mum’s regulars, always nagging her for anything weird she’d managed to pick up.”

Jon’s… heard this story before. Or, rather, he’s heard part of it, and from a different perspective. Part of him is so curious it would be more accurate to call it ‘hungry.’ He’s wanted to pick Gerry’s brain from the moment he realized who they were, and only part of that can possibly be attributed to what, to what he is now. The other part of him remembers others complaining of him having _made_ them tell him things, and then _doing_ something with those complaints. You’d be hard-pressed to make Jon care about ‘made’ when it was Jude or Michael Crew, or even that one man, a traffic warden, hadn’t he been? But it does bother him a little bit, now. It sits uneasy on top of his mind, the way so many other things sit uneasy on top of his mind, now. He doesn’t know what to do with it.

While Jon dithers, Gerry forges on, in a tone halfway between a lecturer and someone talking shop. “I figured it would be a Desolation book for a Desolation avatar. Makes sense. Molina was a bit more…” They visibly fish around for words, before grimacing and settling on “…academic—“ spat out like a slur “—then the rest of his people, but I’d never heard of him seriously going for something that couldn’t be turned back towards his own god.

“Mum wanted the book, if it really was a Leitner. Wanted to sell it, or use it, or bargain with it; I don’t know which. She never told me.” Their mouth pulls bitterly to one side, eyes gleaming with resentment that’s clearly been warmed up, over and over again, never quite allowed to grow stale and cold. It just… Jon recognizes that look. “I just needed to do what she told me. But Desolation books are…” They trail off, sucking in a deep breath, staring out into nowhere as if remembering something half-buried.

“Dangerous?” Jon supplies, both hoping and not-hoping that they’ll take it as a prompt.

Gerry rolls their eyes and snorts, spell thoroughly broken. “To start with. If I’d gotten it and we kept it in the shop, the whole place would have gone up in flames in days. Unless it was one of the weak ones.” They shake their head violently. “Molina never did go for cheap crap. I wasn’t counting on this time being any different. If the book was the real deal, anyways.

“I wasn’t really sure what to _do_ to get rid of a Desolation book, anyways.” Definitely talking shop, now, and sounding almost as if they’re _enjoying_ it, which really throws Jon for a moment, a moment still ongoing when Gerry goes on, “My go-to is to set them on fire and hope that’s the end of it, but no way that’d work with a Desolation book. Fucking thing probably would have just _enjoyed_ it. I don’t remember exactly, but I _think_ my plan might have been to take the book somewhere there weren’t a whole lot of people, grab Mum’s cross shredder, rip the pages out of the book, feed them to the shredder and bury the scraps, and hope nothing got burned down in the process. I…” The enjoyment fades slowly out of Gerry’s voice. “I don’t actually remember much about that night, before the hospital.”

Only when the enjoyment is gone, does Jon start to understand why it might have been there in the first place. It’s… it’s not like there are a lot of people they can’t talk about any of this with, after all. Not a lot of people they can talk about it with who wouldn’t like to hurt them, or kill them, or control them. That…

He doesn’t think he’ll try to shut this down. It might get shut down without his input, but he won’t push towards that conclusion himself. And _no_ , he is not doing this as some sort of secondhand voyeur. He just… It hasn’t been so long that Jon’s forgotten what it is to be genuinely confided in. _Really_ genuinely, with no room to doubt that the person confiding in him is doing it out of a genuine wan, and not because he might be making them without even realizing it. (Or making them and absolutely realizing it, and just not caring.) And Gerry’s just talking and talking and talking, like they haven’t had the opportunity to talk to someone like this in a long time, or maybe not…

So Jon keep his silence. Not just because he’s curious. Not just because Gerry’s gentle voice is well-suited for storytelling. Not just because Gerry’s voice is the sort fit to lull an audience into a near-stupor, if you’re not careful of yourself.

“I remember the book,” Gerry murmurs, eyes locked on the windshield, staring straight ahead. “It was… Yeah.” Their voice catches. “Yeah, it was the real deal. A little book bound in leather so bright a scarlet it hurt to look at for more than a few seconds. It smelled of smoke. Not cigarette smoke, not wood smoke. It just… Just sort of smelled greasy. All the books smell; at least, they all smell to _me_. Corruption smells so putrid I’ve never been able to go near one of them without throwing up. Hunt and Flesh and Slaughter are kinda hard to tell apart sometimes, they all reek of blood. Stranger… Take whatever you think of when you think of the way a book smells, and think about the opposite of that. One of the Stranger’s books smells like something that’s _not_ a book, and that’s about the only way I know to describe it. Beholding…” Gerry’s eyes narrow speculatively, lips pursing. “I… haven’t found too many of those, to be honest,” they say softly. “I couldn’t describe the smell if I tried. I just know I’d recognize it, if I ever found one again.

“‘Course, those rules don’t always hold. Spiral likes to disguise itself as something else, and you never know if the Buried is going to smell like mud or stale water, and the Lonely just takes on the scent of whatever was closest to it, but weaker, and sometimes you get something with…with _mixed_ signals, something that’s sort of in the no-man’s land in between two or three or four of them. But I’m usually right. And Desolation smells like smoke. Greasy smoke. And that book smelled like it was on _fire_.

“I…” Gerry laughs ruefully, ducking their head, studiously avoiding Jon’s gaze. “I found out where Molina was going to be, one night late in December. I… Hmm.” Craning their whole body away from Jon, now. “It was pretty stupid. I was trying out binders, and the one I’d picked out from the shop was too tight. It was getting hard to breathe, and as it turns out—“ trying to make light of it, but Jon already knows where this is going, and he can only feel sick “—it’s kinda hard to think straight when you can’t breathe properly. I made a really fucking basic mistake, and wound up like this.”

Gerry’s staring down at their hands now, both their hands, like they’re willing the scar tissue to recede, and their mouth twists in a scowl when the scar tissue stays right where it is. “Pretty stupid,” they mutter, and their lips drip with bitterness.

Jon still feels a little sick, and the only thing he can think to say is a rueful, trying-at-consoling, “If it makes you feel better, I wound up like this after Jude asked me to shake her hand.”

It was stupid. It was profoundly stupid, a monumentally stupid thing to do, and given that Jon _doubts_ Gerry’s stayed alive this long by being stupid, he rather expects them to tell him that.

But instead, when Gerry turns to look at them, they cock their head to one side, eyes bright with something close to recognition. “Jude… Perry, do you mean?”

“One and the same. Do you know her?”

Gerry snorts. “Never met her. Heard enough about her that I don’t care to. Sounds like a complete fucking sadist—more so than usual for that cult, I mean.” They look at Jon meaningfully. “She doesn’t sound like the sort of person who would have just let you wander off without hurting you.”

Jon lets out a breath he’d not realized he’d been holding. It feels… He doesn’t know why, but it feels like someone’s just taken a yoke off of his shoulders. He’d expected to be told he’d been stupid. He’s been telling himself that it was stupid ever since the moment he felt his flesh begin to boil. It feels like a yoke was taken off of his shoulders. It also feels a little like a blanket was ripped off of his body. It feels better, yes, but there had been something easier about believing that it was just him being stupid, and with it gone…

It’s something he’ll have to think about later. Not something Jon’s putting aside just because he doesn’t want to deal with it right now, though it would be a lie to say that that has nothing at all to do with it. Something he’s putting aside because he cannot parse the thoughts, cannot pick them apart into something he can actually understand. Maybe when he gets home, it’ll be easier. Or maybe it won’t. For now, he’s going to leave it alone.

“And you know, _you know_ , they’re not _normal_ burns. The hospital said these—“ Gerry holds up their hands again, palms out this time, as to display an unbroken layer of wavy red scar tissue “—were only second-degree burns. Second-degree burns aren’t even _supposed_ to scar like this, or so they told me. Normally, the skin just looks a bit weird after it’s all healed, but there shouldn’t be that much scarring, if there’s even any scars at all. But these were never gonna be normal burns.

“Recovery was…” For a moment, they look like the haggard specter Dominic Swain described in his statement, someone who could easily be mistaken for a good ten, even fifteen years older than they actually are. “Not gonna lie.” They even _sound_ like they could be a good ten, fifteen years older than they actually are. “There were a lot of nights when I’d lie awake in bed, I was in so much pain I could never fall asleep, and I wished I had just died. I had the opportunity. If it had been just me, I might have taken it, but it wasn’t just me. Wasn’t fair to…” Their eyes glaze over, once again. “Anyways, recovery was complete and total hell, as you might have gathered.”

“It hasn’t exactly been pleasant for me, either,” Jon remarks wryly, running his good—for a certain value of ‘good’—hand over the scarred one.

Gerry’s face spasms in a grimace of sympathy. “No, I’ll bet not. There was…” Fingers drum against the bag balanced on their lap. “There was a night a couple of months after that. Some guy—Swain, I think his name was—had gotten his hands on another Leitner, had come wandering over to the shop around two in the morning. Maybe three, I don’t remember. Mum let him in and fucked around with him for a little bit, before he just stumbled back out with the book still in hand. Of course, it’s _Mum_ , so she wants the book. And of course, of _course_ —“ a sharp, bitter laugh “—it had to be _me_ going out there and tracking him down to get the book. Of _course_ , Mum couldn’t go out there and do it herself.”

Jon frowns, momentarily thrown. Hadn’t the incident with Dominic Swain come just about a year after the burns? But he shakes the sudden spike of confusion off. Swain remembered the dates wrong, or else Jon’s remembering them wrong. He says nothing, only listens as Gerry goes on.

“It was the first time I’d worn shoes since the hospital. And I mean _real_ shoes, not those floppy slippers you wear around your flat when it gets cold.” They try running their hand through their grimy hair, only to fail when they strike on the tight, matted braid. “Took me about twice as long as it should have to get to his flat. I had to stop about three times—just sat in an alley and _cried_ , it hurt so much. Kept thinking about why I was out there, why I was dragging myself out of bed at fuck o’clock in the morning when I could barely wear clothes tighter than my pajamas without feeling like I was rubbing sandpaper on my skin. I hated it. I didn’t hate it enough to go home, when I knew what I’d be in for if I went home without even trying.

“Swain was…” Fingers drum against the bag again, hard and staccato, fingernails scraping against the canvas. “Swain was pretty bad off. You just had to look at him to tell he was close to some sort of tipping point, and given what his book was, that tipping point probably would have been right off a cliff. The Vast. The book smelled like ozone; the whole _flat_ smelled like ozone. It was close to just… swallowing him, I guess. When I was with him, he could barely stand up without listing; he couldn’t stand up straight at all.

“I… I didn’t bring the book back to Mum.” Jon knows. He knows this story as well. And as before, he chooses not to give any sign of it. “Seemed like this book was dangerous, too; even when it was _shut_ , it filled the whole place up with its smell. Mum’s…” Gerry hunches their shoulders. “The way Mum was, after she put herself in the skin book, she didn’t assess risk the same way she did before. Suppose you don’t have to, when there’s so little left that can actually _hurt_ you anymore. But I was just as fragile as I had been before she did that, and I was thinking a little _more_ about why I had dragged myself out of bed and gone out when I could barely walk around in shoes without screaming. And unless you saw him yourself, it’d be hard to really convey just how _bad_ Swain looked.

“Desolation books don’t burn. Or maybe they do, but once you’ve burned them, you’ve just set whatever was inside loose, and it’s stronger for having fed it the flames first. Vast books…” Fingernails rake against the upholstered ceiling of the car. “Vast books burn _really_ well. Swain still looked rough when I left, but the ozone smell was gone out of the flat the moment the last of the book went up, so…” Their voice pitches high suddenly, cracking with something it takes Jon a moment to recognize as uncertainty. “…So maybe it was okay?”

And that uncertainty isn’t something Jon can just sit unresponsive to. He nods gently. “I’d… I’d say it probably was.”

Gerry tosses their head. “You don’t know the books. Some of them, once they get their claws into you, even once their gone, even once they’ve been destroyed, they can still work on you. I could feel it trying to dig into _me_ as I dumped all that lighter fluid on it. But…” They let their shoulders drop a little, let some of the tension out of their jaw. “…Yeah. If the smell went so quick, then yeah, maybe it was okay.”

Silence fills the car for a few long moments. The sky is still choked with clouds, and Jon expects at any moment for that silence to be punctuated by raindrops pattering on the windshield, the sky unleashing its fury once more, but nothing.

Then, straight out of the blue, just as Jon’s considering heading back through the drive-through for another water bottle and whatever else Gerry might want ( _seriously_ , there is no way that that amount of food was enough, not after how long they went without eating anything at all), Gerry asks, “Did they tell you about the exercises?”

Jon stares at them blankly. “…Exercises?”

Gerry holds up their right hand, flexing the fingers back and forth a couple of times before letting it drop once more. “You know, for your hand? When they let me out after the burns, the hospital sent me home with all of these pamphlets with exercises I’d have to do to regain full mobility and keep my muscles from atrophying while the burns were healing. One of them talked about my hands. Did you get something like that?”

Jon doesn’t have much memory of the hospital, honestly. Or how he got there. Or how he left. But after a few moments, the pamphlet does ring a bell. “…Yes. Yes, I did.”

At the time, memory of the physical therapy he had to undergo after the, the _worms_ was still fresh and stark in his mind. As well as the quarantine, and the decontamination, and the way all of the ECDC people had _looked_ at him while he was undergoing both, though Jon doesn’t know how much of a leg he’s got to stand on, complaining about _looking_. He had resented the pamphlet for forcing those memories back to front and center stage in his mind, and for the first couple of days, he had ignored it. But after those couple of days, he had told himself that he was being stupid, even stupider than he had told himself he was for taking Jude’s hand in the first place, and with the awkwardness of a man who was having to do _everything_ one-handed, he opened the pamphlet and read.

It’s… The difference isn’t always so immediately noticeable as all that. When he’s not using the hand much, or when he’s not using it for anything that requires too much fine motor control, when it’s a day when the scars don’t hurt _too_ badly, the difference isn’t always immediately noticeable. But there’s still a difference, and when he _does_ need to use it a lot, when he _does_ need it for something that requires fine motor control, when the scars _do_ hurt badly…

Those days, those moments of bitter defeat cash against him like a collapsing wall. They always do. _Look what you did to yourself, because you couldn’t walk away from knowledge, because you just couldn’t say ‘no.’_ (‘She wouldn’t have let you wander off without hurting you.’ For some reason, it makes Jon want to cry, for just a moment, before he pushes the impulse down.) Jon’s hand is… _clumsy_ , now, the word he calls it when he’s in a reasonably good mood, and what he calls it when he’s in a bad mood probably doesn’t bear repeating, especially not around someone who could just pick the word from his unwary mind.

Gerry’s looking at him again. That long, intense brand of looking, almost like they _are_ trying to pull words from his unwary mind, though Jon’s thinking on that has shifted a little since this morning, and he wonders if he might not be able to feel something if that was the case. (Did Lesere Saraki feel something? Ah, but was Lesere Saraki anything but human?) “They’re not…” They frown deeply, gaze only intensifies. “They’re not _normal_ scars, you know.” In a tone that sounds like it’s trying to be consoling, but coming out of a mouth that sounds like its experience with being consoling is close to nil, they go on softly, “There’s only so much you can _do_ with them. They’re designed to hurt, as much as possible, for as long as possible. You can’t do much about that.”

There’s a lot that Jon can’t ‘do much about.’ A yellow door flashes through his mind. He tries in vain to remember a face forever obliterated from memory. His hand is nothing compared to both. He says nothing, fearing it would only sound ungrateful—and normally, under circumstances like these, Jon doesn’t think he’d care overmuch about gratitude or a lack thereof, but when it’s coming from someone with the same sorts of burn scars, someone who caught it so much worse than he did…

He keeps his silence. It would be best to keep his silence, when he’s not sure that anything he could say in response to it wouldn’t wind up coming out as something he did not intend at all.

Gerry sucks in a breath that sounds like the ghost of a laugh, if a laugh could die cawing roughly like a crow. “So. I dragged myself out of bed, _really_ aggravated those scars—hell, they were barely scars at all back then, they were healing so slowly—and caught absolute hell from Mum when I came home without that book. All in all, it was a pretty shit night.”

At last, Jon has something he can say that he knows won’t be offensive somehow. (Well, he _hopes_ he knows.) “Swain appreciated it, I imagine.”

It was meant to console (and it doesn’t feel much more natural for Jon than it seemed to feel for Gerry, though Jon thinks he has something less of an excuse), but Jon watches in something close to dismay as Gerry just sinks down into their seat, shrinking again like they’re actually losing mass. The look that steals over Gerry’s face is one Jon thinks he’ll remember for a long time to come. A strange mixture of furtive wariness and something close to shame, underpinned with something it takes Jon a moment to recognize, but eventually is able to name as a worry just shy of outright fear.

Gerry smiles weakly, and that takes a little of the sting out of their reaction, but not quite all, and soon, the sting starts to turn inwards, starts to examine motive and tone. Before that process can start, Gerry has one last thing to say. “You know…” Jon can’t tell if they’re speaking to him specifically, or just to themselves. Once they’re done talking, he still won’t be certain. “Things were easier when I thought my moral compass revolved entirely around spiting my mum,” Gerry murmurs. They dig their fingernails into their forehead, squeezing their eyes shut. “They weren’t _better_ , but they were a _lot_ easier.”


	5. Chapter Five

_Why did I_ say _all of that_?! Gerry wonders to themselves, as the car pulls out of the Arby’s parking lot. True to his word, Jon had gone through the drive-through again when Gerry expressed the desire, and Gerry picked out yet more greasy, and in the case of the milkshake, incredibly sugary, junk food, the sort of thing they might have been worried would affect their health, if they weren’t suddenly finding themselves so hungry that they felt like their stomach acid had worn a hole straight through the bottom of their stomach and nothing in the world was capable of filling it. The lack of judgment was refreshing; Gerry’s gotten way too used to other restaurant-goers staring unabashedly at them and Julia and Herbert when the three of them would hit up a diner after long enough without steady access to food led them all to order quite a _bit_ more than most of the people around them, though they can’t say they particularly enjoy it (They know all too well the difference between being accustomed to something and actually being _alright_ with it). But still, the question lingers:

 _Why did I_ say _all of that_?

Gerry doesn’t think it’s a matter of ‘made,’ not really. Gertrude didn’t like to do it, but Gerry was around a couple of times when the circumstances forced her to compel someone or just walk away empty-handed, and none of the signs of it were present in the car. Gerry doesn’t remember any demands being made, any pressing, probing questions being asked. Gerry doesn’t remember Jon staring at them particularly intently; a lot of the time, it seemed like Jon was avoiding looking at them deliberately. Gerry doesn’t even remember being prompted to say anything, not _really_. Unless an Archivist can compel someone to talk just by being in their close vicinity, Gerry would say that they don’t think there was any sign at all that they were talking out of anything but their own, complete, _stupid_ volition.

They’re parked by a pump at a gas station, now, and Gerry can’t think of anything to do but stare incredulously at Jon while he waits by the pump. It’s not _Jon_ they’re incredulous with, so much as themselves, and the situation in general. There’s a lot to be incredulous about, a lot to be incredulous _with_ , but so far, since they pulled into the Arby’s parking lot, anyways, Jon’s behaved much as Gerry expected them to.

You don’t… You don’t _talk_ about this shit with someone, not unless you’re absolutely sure of them. It’s a small community, and one largely populated by people who jealously guard their secrets, and for good reason—spill too many of your secrets to someone who could be looking to get one over on you, spill too many of your secrets to someone who could be looking to open up a gap in the power structure for them to fill, and you could well find that someone using the knowledge _you_ gave them to put a knife in your back. It’s never happened to Gerry personally, because _so far_ , Gerry’s been smart enough not to share knowledge someone could use to put a knife in their back, but they’ve watched it happen to other people. It’s not a large community, at least not where they’re from. News travels fast, and sometimes it happens up close enough that you can watch it happening with your own eyes, if you find a good-enough hiding spot.

It’s hard to be absolutely sure of someone when you’ve known them for less than a day. No, scratch that: it’s absolutely impossible to be absolutely sure of someone when you’ve known them for less than a day. Even someone with Gerry’s… gifts, would have a hard time with that, especially considering that Gerry can only skim surface thoughts, or dig a little ways past that, if they concentrate _very_ hard and aren’t worried about the headache they’ll have to deal with later if they try digging even half an inch deeper than where they’re easily capable of going. And Jon’s not…

There must be some sort of shoe waiting to drop. Has to be, _has_ to be. ( _What if there isn’t_?) Gerry isn’t absolutely sure of Jon, _can’t_ be absolutely sure of Jon, because they haven’t watched that other shoe drop yet, doesn’t know what it is, exactly (If there even is another shoe to drop at all). Maybe, once Gerry had the proper measure of him, knew better what exactly it is that Jon _wants_ from them, this might have been somewhat less of an absolutely fucking _braindead_ thing to do, but as it stands, Gerry jumped the gun by quite a lot. They jumped the gun by so much that the gun’s still being put together, and Gerry hasn’t got any idea what kind of ammunition’s being loaded into it. That could cost them, that could cost them a _lot_.

Gerry presses their forehead against the passenger’s side window of the car, staring at Jon’s tie-dye clad back and wanting little more than to be able to peel back his skin to try and dig out secrets and intentions _now_ , so they don’t have to have it all drop down on them at once later, when they might no longer be properly ready for it. He just…

Gerry knows what he is. He might not be cut from the same cloth as _Gertrude_ , but Gerry still knows what he is. But he seems so _harmless_ , a small, mousy man who seems to come off worse in every single encounter he has with anything else that happens to be eldritch, judging by all the scars, all the fresh, mottled bruises on his arms, a clear sign of the rough handling Julia and Herbert put him through when they first intercepted him. Hell, the scars on his hand make Gerry wince, sure, but they can’t look at the one on his neck without _cringing_ , and Gerry can well guess just how much hurt Jon was able to give back to whoever put that scar there in the first place.

Jon seems so _harmless_ , and regardless of whether or not there’s another shoe waiting to drop, regardless of whatever the ulterior motive might be, he still risked himself helping Gerry in ways that Gerry cannot imagine anyone _else_ coming looking for them deciding would be worth the effort. It was a… It was a _lot_ to do for someone you must be planning to use as a tool, a lot to do for someone who can’t possibly be useful to him forever.

_What if he’s not trying to…_

Gerry presses their forehead even harder against the window, to the point that they _know_ there’s going to be a big, bright red mark on their forehead by the time they yank their head back. At this point, they’re practically _daring_ Jon to turn round and spot them staring at him, but nope. Whatever it is on that weird screen up top of the pump, it has his _full_ attention, and the idea that Gerry might be staring at him never seems to cross his mind.

_He’s not nearly wary enough of his surroundings. I’ll have to talk to him about that. He can’t be going about, being who he is, being what he is, without ever being worried about what might be coming up behind him. That’s a great way to get killed, and I can’t always…_

Funny, that Gerry’s already to the point of thinking like that, of thinking that this is an arrangement that’s going to persist long after they step down off of that plane, regardless of what Jon’s trying to get out of it—or what he’s _not_ trying to get out of it. They’d had thoughts about this like Gertrude, sometimes, though they were based more around her age and the inevitable frailties related to it than they were to any lack of wariness on Gertrude’s part; Gertrude had problems, but _unwariness_ was _not_ one of them. ( _How the fuck did anyone ever manage to kill her_?)

Well. Jon seems harmless to Gerry. It’s probably not just Gerry to whom Jon seems harmless. To start with, Gerry only watched Jon interact with the hunters for a split-second, but neither one of them seemed to take him seriously at _all_. Maybe that was intentional on his part. Maybe he kept quiet about who he was, what he was, and what he could do around them. Gerry doesn’t know him nearly well enough to guess if that’s so, but if so, smart of him—Gerry likes to think that they would remember how bad a regime change would be for them, but if they thought they could feed the beast by killing another ‘monster,’ Jon might not have been able to get them to care about regime changes long enough for them to put their fists back down. _Gerry_ certainly wouldn’t have been able to do it. Gerry’s never been able to keep them from killing someone. Gerry doesn’t have a good track record of convincing the hunters not to kill people. They don’t have a good track record of convincing anything or anyone not to kill people.

The face of that… plumber, maybe? The face of a man whose name Gerry never learned, whose occupation they’re at best uncertain of, flashes through their mind. Not alive, of course, never alive. If Gerry’s mind has a choice between remembering something alive or dead, it always goes for the corpse, and damn what that does to Gerry’s already monumentally fucked sleeping patterns. Who needs sleep, right? Apart from anything human, and most things inhuman, that is.

It was ages ago. They were _twelve_ ; it was more than half a lifetime ago. But the tunnels under Pall Mall, they’re… special. Everything Gerry took away from that place has hung on since then, and never for a moment left. That man’s face, locked in a rictus of eye-popped terror, a terror so bone-deep that even the chill of death couldn’t strip it away, that’s stayed. It was Gerry’s first big failure, it was the night when they had to—

The car isn’t going to take forever to fill up. If Jon comes back inside and finds Gerry wet with cold sweat and so strung-out they can barely string a sentence together, he’ll want an explanation. Anyone would, considering Gerry wasn’t anything like that when Jon first got out of the car. They’re not ready for that. They already think about it too much. They’re not ready to talk about it, not with someone they’d have to walk through every step of what Gerry did, and what happened to them. They suck in a deep breath, and though it fails to steady them, they can breathe a little more steadily once they have. They sit up straight in their seat; if they’ve slouched down so far that they’re halfway to the floorboards, that’s going to draw notice as well. And last of all, Gerry wrenches their gaze away from Jon, though it feels like shoving him halfway off a cliff to do it.

Later, later. Maybe never. Not now. They’re not going to do _anything_ that could provoke the conversation.

 _‘Swain appreciated it.’_ That sticks, though, and unlike the rest of it, refuses to go back down when Gerry tries to force it.

Maybe he did appreciate it. Or maybe what Gerry did wasn’t enough, and he’s dead, now, or he’s not dead and the Vast ate him, or the Vast didn’t eat him but he had to give himself to it to keep it from swallowing him whole. Maybe Swain appreciated it, or maybe he curses the short-sighted stranger who arrogantly thought they could help him and then did such a piss-poor job of it that he’s worse off now than he was when _Ex Altiorā_ went up in smoke. Gerry isn’t willing to believe that burning the book was the absolute end of it, and that Swain just went off and lived his life untroubled afterwards, not anymore. It doesn’t work like that, doesn’t work like that, doesn’t _work like that_ —at least, not for them.

Things really were easier when Gerry thought their entire moral compass revolved entirely around doing whatever would piss off Mum the most. A spark of bitter, giddy laughter tears out of Gerry’s mouth, so loud and braying that their eyes dart towards where Jon’s been standing, fearful that he might have heard. But Jon’s heading towards the shop—receipt, maybe? He’s _completely_ ignoring what Gerry told him about not going off anywhere by himself, but at least he didn’t hear it. At least Gerry doesn’t have to deal with that, either.

Once upon a time, they cared considerably less about whether something was right to do for its own sake. Once upon a time, Gerry had an anger in them that felt larger than their whole body, and when they let that anger speak to them, when they let themselves listen to it, what they cared most about was finding whatever would make Mum the angriest to do, and then do it. That anger shriveled into nothing when they actually had to go and _face_ Mum after doing something designed to piss her off, their mind reasserted itself and berated them for their own stupidity as Mum’s own tremendous anger found a place to vent, but before that moment, in the moments when they’d somehow managed to _forget_ what they were going home to if they made Mum well and truly _livid_ …

It wasn’t better. Of course it wasn’t better. Gerry’s never had much of a life, at least not compared to the ideas presented to them in books of what a full, rich life should actually look like, but that was pretty much no life at all.

( _I still have pretty much no life at all._ If anyone’s got the magical formula for how Gerry stops thinking about their mum every day, now would be the time to reveal it to them.)

But after that—

Gerry can’t. They just can’t anymore. They can’t think about people who died because they didn’t try hard enough to help them, can’t think about people who got eaten or had to become something else to keep from getting eaten, if they have to think about the fact that the only reason they even tried to help them at all was to spite Mum.

_‘I don’t usually go out of my way for strays.’_

They said that, once, or said something like it, and then they just had to live with it. Had to live with not knowing, had to live with wondering, had to live with the dreams, the nightmares, the missing details filled in by an over-eager imagination more than ready to push them, even if the world didn’t know there was anything worth punishing and the one accuser was beyond accusing. They just had to live with it, and they can’t, they can’t, they _can’t_ go through that again. Can’t do it again, not without trying _something_ , at least.

They have had to sit there and watch, though. They have had to watch all of their words, all of their attempts at persuasion, all of their pleading, all of their _begging_ , come to absolutely nothing. So they’ve fucked up trying harder, too. All the people the hunters have killed while Gerry’s been in their company, all the people who were legitimately inhuman and trying to cause them harm, all the people who were legitimately inhuman but who weren’t bothering any of them, all the people who were on the border, who could yet have turned back, all the people who only seemed off to the hunters because they were already marked by something other than the Hunt, all the people who didn’t have anything out of the mundane going on with them at all, but who were just _mistaken_ for something other than a completely mundane human being, Gerry’s not been able to do a _thing_ for them that actually made a difference for them. Wherever it is they’ve ended up, wherever it is people go when they die and don’t come back—perhaps they are simply, finally swallowed up by the End, or maybe there’s some place beyond the End where those people who are well and truly dead and rejected he End in the process go where absolutely nothing can touch them—maybe they’re all waiting for Gerry there so they can give them a piece of their mind. (Maybe it’s where Mum went after Gertrude burned her pages, after Gerry _delivered_ their mum to her murderer, after they as good as killed their mum themselves, and they all have to deal with _her_ there now. There’s another reason to be absolutely, profoundly, _monumentally_ ungrateful to them for their lackluster efforts. Anyone who has to spend death with Mum would be begging for somewhere to go to be _even deader_ within the hour, Gerry has no doubt.)

It could easily be Jon waiting in the place beyond the End (if he’s capable of dying so profoundly anymore, if he wouldn’t give himself completely to the Beholding to avoid being swallowed up by the End; Gerry’s known the man for less than a day, they can hardly claim to know what choice he would make if he had to choose between death and becoming something else) to give Gerry a piece of his mind for not protecting him well enough, if Gerry doesn’t keep a close enough eye on him. It could easily be Jon, dead Jon, images of his dead face and mutilated body ready to obliterate all memory of him alive from Gerry’s mind, if Gerry doesn’t protect him better, if Gerry doesn’t teach him better how to navigate a world where there are two avatars who _definitely_ want to kill him, and probably at least a few more who’d like to kill him as well, if Jude and whoever put that scar on his neck are still around. (Gerry’s seen the little round scars peppering his arms and the hand not absolutely _carpeted_ in Desolation-burn scars. They’ve… got an idea of where they came from. It’s not like the books; scars inflicted by the eldritch don’t have a particular odor. But Gerry has looked out of the corner of their eye at those scars, and in those moments, those unguarded moments, they’ve occasionally thought they saw them _wriggling_. The last they checked, the sort of people who could leave scars like _that_ aren’t usually as hell-bent on finishing what they started as the likes of one of the people from the Cult of the Lightless Flame, let _alone_ as hell-bent on it as Julia or Herbert. But it’s definitely something to follow up on, when they have the time.) Gerry doesn’t want that, and _if_ they don’t want that, they’re going to have to try _harder,_ aren’t they?

_‘Swain appreciated it.’_

And the strangest thing is, the absolute fucking _weirdest_ thing is, up until _that_ got said, Gerry was actually enjoying themselves. Talking shop with somebody they aren’t completely certain of, and they were actually _enjoying_ themselves. Being stuck with Herbert and Julia’s done things to them, is all they can figure. Beyond the things Gerry actually _knows_ being stuck with the hunters has done to them, anyways.

It wasn’t like back in the hotel room. Maybe there was a tiny bit of compulsion going into that, though Gerry thinks that might be just as much down to the tape recorder (that thing’s _got_ to be eldritch) as to Jon himself. Maybe there was a tiny bit of compulsion going into that, for though Gerry could talk easily enough, and speak of their mum _much_ more easily than they’d thought they would (with Gertrude, it was always minutes-long rants or surly silence, on the exceptionally rare occasions—Gertrude wanted to talk about Mum absolutely _not at all_ —when Gertrude brought up their mum in conversation) with someone who was a stranger to them and her both, to someone who had clearly heard about Mary Keay through the grapevine (‘village witch’ is _way_ too specific and even more scarily accurate for someone who was hearing about her for the first time in that situation) but had also clearly never had the pleasure of meeting her in person, they’d not gotten much in the way of _enjoyment_ out of it. It just felt… just felt like a bit of a relief, really, to get it out, and once the spike of alarm over the fact that Gertrude’s successor, a man who’d taken up the torch of trying to stop the fucking _end of the world_ , knew fuck-all about the powers that move unseen all around them, outside of this world and yet an integral part of it, Gerry was downright _eager_ to properly educate him, since no one else had taken the trouble. Hell, Gerry can’t claim to be an expert on it themselves, but whatever scraps of knowledge they could impart, they wished to impart.

They hadn’t enjoyed it, not really. They hadn’t felt the way they had in the car outside of the Arby’s, hadn’t felt like there was some, some _veil_ being pierced, some screen being ripped away, some hand being offered, and Gerry taking it. That last bit might just be some kind of delusion, probably was some kind of delusion, but even if it was delusional, it had still felt so profoundly different than back in the hotel room. Gerry had _enjoyed_ talking shop about the books. Gerry had enjoyed, if only a little bit, when they talked about the run up to Molina… Yeah. And for some absolutely _bizarre_ reason that they’re not even sure how to more closely examine in any way, shape, or form, Gerry had even enjoyed, if only an even smaller bit, talking about the burns themselves.

Just… _why_?

No, seriously, _why_? Gerry can’t remember ever enjoying talking about the burns before.

Then again, Gerry doesn’t think they ever _have_ spoken of the burns before, except with doctors whom they _had_ to share the information with. They could never tell those doctors the truth of how they got those burns, exactly, beyond a very basic, and basically honest, ‘I don’t remember much about that night.’ They never could talk about it with a doctor who wouldn’t look at the scars with varying degrees of disguised to undisguised horror while they thought Gerry couldn’t see them doing it.

Jon hasn’t… It’s probably just because Jon’s got some nasty Desolation-inflicted burn scars of his own. Jon must have recognized Gerry’s scars as being of a similar character to his own, even if he didn’t consciously recognize them as such until Gerry told him that. That’s got to be it, got to be why he hasn’t gawked at the scars like damn near everybody else has upon first realizing that that’s what they are.

But still, _why_ is it that they could so easily just—

Jon’s not nearly as conscious of his surroundings as he ought to be, considering who he is, what kind of world he’s living in, and just who he’s made enemies of recently. If anybody tried to claim otherwise, Gerry would laugh in their face, and then promptly give them an earful. In this moment, though, Gerry suspects that someone might laugh at _them_ if they claimed that _they_ were fit to teach him otherwise, because the driver’s side door swings open suddenly and Gerry jolts so badly that their head hits the roof.

 _Fuck_ , that hurts. Gerry’s had a tender head many, _many_ times before, and they’ve gotten hit over the head with a dozen harder things than that, leave alone what the surgery did to the tenderness levels of their head, but _still,_ Gerry’s scrubbing their head and gritting their teeth, blinking glittering stars out of their eyes.

When they’ve gathered themselves enough to at least _try_ and look around and get their bearings, Jon’s sitting in the driver’s seat again, looking at them with an expression of mild concern on his face. “Are you… are you alright?” he asks uncertainly.

That’s such an obvious question that Gerry’s amazed he has to ask. There’s a temptation there, a serious temptation to go into all the ways, and there are _many_ , in which Gerry is not _remotely_ alright and hasn’t been for years, but Gerry’s not stupid enough to think that Jon meant that generally rather than in response to their hitting their head, and the idea of being an ass to Jon and just starting to rattle off the litany of their traumas and failings and petty grievances makes them feel guilty enough that they clamp their mouth down over it before it can begin to take too concrete of a shape.

Less heatedly than they would have said it just a few minutes ago, honestly less heatedly than they had intended to say it just _now_ , “I told you not to go off anywhere without me.”

“I just needed to get the receipt.” Defensive, yeah, but Gerry can pick up on some traces of embarrassment as well underneath. _Yeah_ , he definitely forgot. “Honestly, Gerry, if they didn’t catch up to us while we were eating, I don’t think they’re going to catch up to us while we’re here.”

Definitely forgot, and definitely isn’t taking this as seriously as he should. Gerry stares at him in silence for a long moment that feels like it’s stretching towards eternity, not certain of what to say. It’s not that they’re at a loss for things to say. They’ve got a bunch of prompts crowding their mind, and they can’t settle on one for more than a few moments before discarding it for one reason or another. Many of them are too harsh, would no doubt make Jon cringe in his seat the way he cringed when Gerry summoned Mum’s shadow long enough to steal one of her smiles. Gerry doesn’t want to be harsh, doesn’t want to… Still more of them are too gentle, could easily be brushed off by someone who isn’t inclined to take the situation seriously, even if the tone Gerry used was somewhat _less_ than gentle. Gerry does not want to run the risk of trying to convince Jon that all of this is, you know, _not a game_ , and having him come away from the conversation even less inclined to take the situation seriously than he was before.

But all of them are insufficient, and ultimately, for the same reason. None of them manage to say what Gerry wants to say, what Gerry can’t find a way to say without eviscerating themselves—purely metaphorically, which would make for a nice change of pace, but Gerry’s less certain on whether it would _feel_ like a metaphorical evisceration.

You can’t just _say_ what you want to say, not at times like these, not when you don’t have the measure of the person you’re saying it to, not when you’re still waiting for the other shoe to drop, and the likelihood slowly gaining traction in your mind, that there’s no shoe waiting to drop at all, makes you feel as unbalanced as if you’ve been struck down with vertigo at the edge of a cliff. You can’t just say what you want to say, not when you realize that it’s not just that you’ve come perilously close to liking this person, but that you _do_ like them, that you like them well enough that you want to see the hunters kill them even less than you’ve wanted to see them kill anyone else. You can’t just say what you want to say when saying what you want to say would open up a hole in your chest by which anyone could reach in and do violence to your heart. Gerry’s heart, they like to believe, has been well-protected up until now. (Which is an appalling lie, but let’s go with it.) They’re not ready to relax their vigilance, just yet.

Meanwhile, Jon seems to have taken Gerry’s silence as… Gerry’s not sure, actually. They’re not sure, and they’re not about to go digging through his head trying to find out, no matter how they might feel about not knowing. They learned a long time ago only to do that when it’s an emergency; exerting their own unknowable eye god-given powers to pluck information from people’s heads never fails to make them… hungry.

Whatever Jon’s taken away from the silence, and it could be a whole host of things, he puts the keys back into the ignition, and the car floods with blessedly cold air once more. “Do you want anything inside?” he asks, and only a touch uncertainly, too—Gerry wonders how long it will take for them to become completely predictable to him.

Gerry shakes their head. Bad enough that Jon’s already gone off by himself once. Gerry’s sure as hell not going to leave him by himself by walking away, not if there’s _any_ way they can avoid it. They can go without for a few hours. Not, they think, sparing an only faintly rueful look at cooling mozzarella sticks and melting milkshake, that they’re really going to be going _without_ this afternoon. That’ll be a lot more food than they’ve had in a lot of recent—and many not-so-recent—afternoons.

Jon shrugs, though Gerry can’t fail to mark the way his neck stiffens, ever so slightly. “I’ll have to pull over at a rest stop in a couple of hours,” he asserts, and there’s a ‘don’t argue with me’ tone if Gerry’s _ever_ heard the way it comes out of the mouth of somebody who doesn’t know how Gerry can argue, and circumvent, and just _ignore_. “I can’t drive all afternoon without a break.”

And whatever Jon thinks his tone was meant to convey, Gerry nearly does break into another argument. Alright, fair enough, they both needed food and the car needed fuel even worse. But they’ve wasted so much time here already, time the hunters could easily have used to speed off in pursuit. They could be bearing down on them as they waste time in this gas station at another standoff. Hell, they could be discussing the best ways to kill Jon when they catch him _right now_ , and if Gerry has to—

But Jon’s just looking at them steadily, calmly, and it’s not a calm like he’s forgotten that there’s a pair of killers out for his blood who could be tracking him down _right now_ , it’s a calm like there’s something in his mouth, waiting on his tongue, something he’s not going to say but is willing Gerry to hear anyways.

Jon… Jon was right, earlier, when he said that if they both got into a wreck and died, they wouldn’t have to worry about the hunters anymore. He’d been right in his implication—implication? It wasn’t that long ago, but Gerry wasn’t exactly operating with everything neatly in place in their head, and they really can’t remember if it was said outright or not—that such a conclusion wouldn’t have been _better_. Gerry can admit that—at least, they can admit that _now_.

It’s not the thing that’s not said, and trying to be heard, anyways. That thing is—

It clicks, snaps right into place in Gerry’s mind and refuses to leave, and Gerry really, _really_ doesn’t know how to deal with it.

In lieu of actually dealing with it, they shrug their shoulders, doing their best to seem casual instead of mildly concussed, and do their best not to sound mildly choked as they mutter, “Do what you like.”

If Jon takes any offense to that (and Gerry’s half-hoping he will; it would feel much less alien for him to be offended), he gives no sign of it. That weird, antsy tenderness is back in his face, shifting uneasily across his skin as if it has sapience enough to know it doesn’t belong there. Gerry looks him dead in the eye, and however uneasy it might seem, it never wavers.

Gerry tries to remember if Gertrude ever looked at them like that. After a few moments, moments in which eye contact is finally severed and the car is put into drive, they give up on that as a completely, unforgivably braindead train of thought. No, Gertrude never looked at Gerry like that. _Gertrude_ was never confused about the nature of their relationship.

Gerry had been, though, they _think_ , at least a little bit. They’d never been stupid enough to think that Gertrude _cared_ for them, not in any really disinterested way. Gertrude always did remind Gerry way too much of Mum for them to fall into that particular bear trap, and honestly, Gertrude never _encouraged_ them towards falling into that particular bear trap. In that regard, at least, Gertrude had been honest with them. But there had been a time when they’d thought they were valuable enough that at least she wouldn’t—

They’re confused again. They think Jon might be confused, too. They really don’t know what to do about it, and it’s only Jon’s own _obvious_ confusion that keeps confusion from spurring itself into anger, though which one of them the anger would be directed at, Gerry isn’t certain. They’re uncertain of so many things.

Confusion sits with Gerry as they get back onto the interstate. Confusion’s never been what they would call a friend—I mean, do _you_ call the things that have tried to kill you your friends? Right now, Gerry tells themselves they’re not feeling warmly towards confusion because confusion’s hogging the seat and pushing them further and further into the lumpy door with each passing moment. That’s a perfect reason to feel coldly towards something, isn’t it, even—no, _especially_ —something born in your own mind, isn’t it? If something born in your own mind is pushing your body to push itself towards a lumpy, unforgiving car door, surely that’s a valid reason to dislike it. Surely, Gerry doesn’t have to examine the impulse any further, just like they don’t have to examine why they’ve almost completely given up on surveying their surroundings, and have instead started to look at Jon like he’s the most engrossing thing they’ve ever seen.

Normally, on a day like this, Gerry would at least want to admire the shade of blue the sky has become. There are still clouds, of course; storm clouds don’t go away so quickly. There are still clouds, and those clouds are a shade lighter than gunmetal, bordered with slate. It could easily rain later, though given that the clouds have been breaking up rather than gathering together, Gerry doesn’t think there will be rain again until sometime tonight, if there’s rain at any point today at all. But the sky behind those clouds is a piercing, dazzling cyan, the kind of shade that Gerry often hesitates to use as a color for a midday sky when they paint, for fear that anyone who looked at the painting would think the shade unrealistically bright, but here it is, painted onto the _real_ sky, and you can’t argue that the _real_ sky is too bright a shade in color to be real, can you?

Normally, on a day like this, Gerry would at least contemplate the sky for a little while, trying to work themselves up into using a shade of color like that for their own painting (the next time they actually have the opportunity to paint; they can’t even remember now, just how long it’s been) in spite of the fact that some people might think the shade unrealistic. Who cares, anyways, whether or not the sky is a particularly realistic shade of blue, unless the picture in question is _supposed_ to be photorealistic? Gerry’s experience with people looking at their paintings… well… Gerry’s experience with people who are not _Mum_ looking at their paintings is highly limited, mostly to the people who have drifted into the bookshop over the years, and yeah, some of them have been art critics, or at least people who have _fancied_ themselves art critics, and they’ve had some things to say about Gerry’s work that Gerry didn’t much care for, but most have just stared at it like they’ve never seen anything like it, and while it’s not always a flattering look that they’ve got plastered on their face, to have painted something the likes of which they’ve never seen before is _some_ sort of achievement, at least.

And yet, they find themselves staring at Jon, and the sky was only a concern for a few moments before Gerry’s eyes were inexorably drawn to the driver of the car in which they sit, instead. They’re daring Jon to look at them, they know that much, even if they don’t rightly know _why_. They’re not certain what they would even say to Jon if he was to notice them staring, if he was to look over at them and see them staring and want to know _why_. The ignorance of what they would even say seems a distant concern in the face of their own confusion.

But Jon never looks over to them, never sees them staring at him, never asks them why. The road conditions aren’t any worse than they were this morning—they’re considerably better, honestly, for the lack of storming, and the road would have to be downright perilous for conditions to be _worse_ —but Jon’s devoted himself to an _intense_ concentration upon the road, and short of actually speaking to him, Gerry isn't certain what exactly they could do that would draw his attention onto them. Actually, Gerry isn’t certain that speaking would be enough, he’s fixated so intently upon the road.

That suits Gerry fine. That suits them _just_ fine. They’ve got enough to think about without having Jon trying to have a conversation with them thrown into the mix. Especially considering that Jon seems to be just as confused about things as Gerry is.

At least, Gerry thinks he is.

What exactly _is_ the nature of their relationship supposed to be? They… they haven’t actually discussed it, Gerry’s realizing for the first time. Gertrude hadn’t discussed it with Gerry, either, at least not in so many words, but it was clear from the beginning with her, just what Gerry was supposed to be to her. But now it’s not Gertrude anymore, but Jon, and they haven’t had any such conversation, not really, and where Gerry would have just _assumed_ , they’re not sure that they can assume anything at all.

It should feel…

Gerry isn’t sure what it should feel. Stomach churning, beads of sweat starting to form on their forehead, they don’t know what it is they should be feeling, what they should be thinking of the ambiguity, and know only that whatever it is that they should be feeling, what it is they _are_ feeling isn’t it. Actually, Gerry’s not sure what it is they’re feeling _now_ , just have some sense of the wrongness of it, and some idea that whatever it is they _should_ be feeling, it’s off in the opposite direction from what they _are_ feeling.

So. Everything’s wrong. The world feels like it’s trying to tilt on its axis and dump everything on it off into the vacuum of space. Except it doesn’t feel the way it _usually_ feels like the way it does when everything’s wrong and Gerry could swear the world is trying to tip everything on it off into the vacuum of space. So… there’s that.

There’s a couple of moments when breathing gets difficult and Gerry has to suck in a few gasping breaths so loud that they’re dead certain people in the car in the next lane over could hear them, let alone _Jon_. And Jon does frown a little, and there’s a moment when Gerry can practically _feel_ his eyes drift over towards them, and in that moment, Gerry finds themselves cringing the way Jon must have been cringing back in the hotel room when Gerry painted Mum’s shade over their face, but…

But Jon just lets it go. Gerry finds a way to breathe normally again, though their face is sticky with sweat by the time they do so, and their chest hurts like they’ve just been kicked, but they manage to get to the point where they’re breathing properly again, and Jon just… doesn’t make an issue out of it. Doesn’t act like it’s a huge problem, doesn’t act like Gerry’s falling apart at the seams and being a burden and…

After a certain point, Gerry can’t sort out their thoughts well enough anymore to focus on this. They stop trying, and though they still can’t find it in them to admire the pretty blue sky as they would have on literally any other afternoon (even being stuck with the hunters couldn’t take this away from them, though Gerry is sure that on the days when they had managed to piss off the hunters specially, they would have liked to be able to _try_ ), they’re at least able to look at it now. Their gaze drifts back to Jon on the regular, and a swell of jumbled, chaotic thoughts and feelings starts rattling around in their head and screaming every time they do, but they can at least _look_ at something that isn’t Jon. That’s something, isn’t it?

The little digital clock on the dashboard of the car reads ‘3:37’ when they pull into a rest stop that’s much like any rest stop Gerry’s seen, in their experience of shitty American highways and shitty American interstates. There’s a depressing little building made entirely out of plain, unpainted gray concrete, which comprises bathrooms and a nook for vending machines and a little room with too many windows where people can buy roadmaps at what are no-doubt heinously inflated prices. There’s a parking lot with asphalt so cracked it looks more like gravel in some places, and a wide, admittedly well-kept green backed by dense forest, pine trees and oaks and maples and some other species of trees Gerry can’t identify at this distance, and might not be able to identify even if they were to walk all the way up to them, trees that throw off dense shadows, even at this time of day in the middle of summer. Off behind them, the cars zip by in gusts of air too harsh and too loud to be the wind.

Gerry hopes that wherever they wind up spending the night, it’s not anywhere like this, let alone somewhere like a _truck stop_. That’s just asking to get snatched by whatever traipses out of the night, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be Herbert or Julia, though it would just be so _natural_ for them to melt out of the darkness of a nighttime forest, even as weird as Julia can get at night, especially on cloudy nights or nights when the moon has dwindled down to nothing, to a dark disc distinguishable from the rest of the sky only by the absence of stars in the space that it occupies. Hell, give Julia a strong enough flashlight, and even her own twitchy weirdness starts to dissipate; even if it never leaves her behind entirely, she eventually gets to the point where she can operate in the dark nearly as well as she can during the day. It could be them who come knocking on the car window come midnight. Or it could be something else entirely. If there’s one thing Gerry’s learned about the American highway system, it’s that it’s a breeding ground for many things beyond truck stops and cheap gift shops and bizarre and engrossing curiosities meant to draw in tourists. It’s a breeding ground for so many different things.

Wherever they wind up spending the night, Gerry hopes it’s not a rest stop, but to be standing here in this sweltering, sticky afternoon, at the moment when a breeze is _just_ starting to come in and provide something that might, in an hour or so, if it actually manages to persist that long, be mistaken for relief, it feels… nice, maybe? Nice, Gerry thinks? Hell, what’s _nice_ even supposed to mean, right now?

So they get out of the car and just sort of… stand there, looking like a deer caught in the headlights or a raccoon caught digging around in the cat’s food bowl or whatever metaphor you’d like to insert regarding the local wildlife. Their back hurts, little darts of agony shooting up and down, so habitual and familiar that Gerry can almost ignore them, and their legs are sore as they ever are when they’ve been stuck in a car for hours. The wind blows on their face like a hot breath of air too close. Like Gerry thought before, it could be nice in an hour or so, when it’s actually strong enough and cool enough to make a difference. For now, the only ‘nice’ Gerry can tack onto it has to be followed by a question mark. Maybe it’s nice, maybe it’s not. Gerry’s not really in a state where they could tell you for certain.

“Are you alright?” What they _are_ is in a state where Jon’s gotten out of the car as well and immediately started looking at them, squinting against the afternoon sunlight and looking at Gerry as if he expects them to tip over at any moment, and then need serious amounts of help just getting back up again.

Maybe Gerry does look like that. They really couldn’t tell you.

“Fine,” they tell him, and they mean it as a lie. _Really_ mean it as a lie. But what rolls of their tongue might not feel like truth, but it doesn’t have the bitter flavor of a lie, either. It’s just… weird.

Jon doesn’t seems convinced. He’s still squinting at them when he points towards the concrete building. “I… was going to go inside?”

For some reason, it’s framed as a question, even though Gerry can easily guess that Jon would have gone in regardless of what Gerry thought about it, and Gerry… Well, Gerry knows what they would have done. Regardless of how _they_ feel regarding a stop, they’re not about to let Jon go wandering off by himself, not if they’re actually capable of following after him. As far as the hunters are concerned, this is a _much_ worse place to be going off by yourself in than the gas station.

Gerry shrugs. They doubt it looks any more casual than it did the last time they shrugged, but they shrug, anyways. “’Kay.”

As they’re heading up towards the cracked cobblestone path towards a collection of no doubt dingy bathrooms smelling of a _delightful_ combination of bleach and urine, and a collection of no doubt at least half-empty vending machines, Jon calls back behind him, “Have you thought much about what you’re going to do when you get back home?”

Is this it? Is it the hook, is it the other shoe dropping a little early? Gerry blinks against the light, peering intently at Jon’s back as they weigh their options. Make it seem too hostile, and they risk being forced, or else risk being shut off entirely from what’s going on with the Unknowing. Seem too eager, and risk being reeled in further than they want. Eventually, Gerry settles on a diffident, guarded, “Haven’t thought too much about that. Didn’t really think I’d _be_ going home until this morning.”

Jon nods, a shallow bob of his head as if reminding himself of something. “That makes sense.”

He says nothing more for the rest of the walk up the hill to the concrete block pretending to be a building. The silence is punctuated only by a low howling as the wind picks up and the squeal of a car horn that turns to a wail as it speeds further away down the interstate. There are other cars here, but Gerry has seen no one since they got out of theirs. Well, it’s not like they looked too hard into the windows of the room where they sell all of those flimsy, overpriced roadmaps. And it’s not like there are too many other cars parked here.

And it gives them time to contemplate ‘that makes sense.’ Doesn’t sound like the sort of thing someone would just pass up on. Gerry’s memories of the night Gertrude brought them the skin book back, less several pages, are pretty hazy, but they’re pretty sure their admission of not knowing what to _do_ with themselves now is what Gertrude had pounced on.

Jon could just be giving it a bit more time, trying to make it seem more casual, trying to make it seem less obvious. That could be it. You shouldn’t put things past someone you’ve known for less than a day. That could definitely be it.

They step into the covered walkway connecting the front part of the rest stop with the back. There are no lights on under the concrete roof, and no fans blowing, but it still feels about twenty degrees cooler under here than it does out there, and Gerry lifts a hand to mop sweat from the back of their neck. Their hair already feels gross enough without adding fresh sweat to the mix.

Out past the building, there’s a cobblestone path in slightly better condition than the one they just walked up, a path that winds its way down the hill. The grass is slightly less well-kept, here, though the extent of the neglect seems to amount to the occasional weed that shoots several times taller than the grass around it. A few shade trees too small to be visible from the parking lot dot the path, along with the odd azalea bush, and beneath the former sit weather-beaten, splinter-bristling picnic tables, all empty. Gerry thinks they can hear a child laughing somewhere, but they see no sign of them.

They _thought_ Jon would make a beeline for the restroom the moment they got in here, but instead, when Gerry turns their eyes away from the searing brightness and blinks their eyes back into focus, Jon’s still standing beside them, looking at them as if working up the nerve to ask another question.

The Archivist is the last person on earth who should be dainty about asking _questions_ , and Gerry almost tells him so, before swallowing down on it. They can’t think of a single way to say it without snapping, and they don’t want… They really just don’t want to snap at him. The thought of it makes it feel like something inside of them is shriveling to nothing. Probably not their heart; their heart’s already so shriveled that probably nothing could make it any _more_ shriveled. Instead, Gerry takes a breath, and lets “What is it?” slip out on the exhale.

Jon shifts his weight from foot to foot awkwardly, as if trying to shift something too heavy to get off of his tongue. When he speaks, though, he gives little sign of it, and “Do you… do you have a place to stay?” is addressed to them only a little hesitantly.

Honest answer is best. The honest answer tells Jon where to find them if he runs into trouble with the hunters and somehow manages to get away from them. “If the bookshop hasn’t burned down, I’ll be staying there.”

It was a straightforward enough answer, but one that seems to throw Jon for a loop. “Really?” He stutters, the little noises never resolving themselves into words, before finally managing to ask, “You really want to stay there?”

It’s hard not to bristle at that—hard enough that Gerry doesn’t bother trying not to. “I don’t have much of a choice,” they snap. “It’s not like—“

The door to the women’s bathroom flies open, and a pair of small, shrieking children come tearing out, followed at a considerably more sedate pace by a woman Gerry can only assume to be their mother. Gerry and Jon both flatten themselves against the cool concrete wall to keep from being bowled over by the kids, and Gerry ducks their head in an attempt to avoid the mother’s scrutiny, saying nothing until they’ve heard a car engine rev. They don’t particularly like to risk people who have nothing to do with their world overhearing anything they say that might veer straight into that world. It’s not exactly _sporting_ , now is it?

Once the car’s pulled out of the parking lot, Gerry turns their attention back to Jon, scowling deeply at him. “It’s not like I’ve got anywhere else kitted out to deal with everything I might bring home,” they hiss. “That’ll take time to put together, and I’d need somewhere I could count on the landlord not coming in and finding it. Besides, I’d need time to find a place like that, anyways. You can’t just find new housing overnight— _trust me_ , I’ve tried. Where _else_ am I supposed to go?”

At that, Jon pulls himself up to his full height—still distinctly average, and Gerry’s still looking _down_ at him when he does it, but Gerry can’t remember him standing so straight before. He’s a little like Gerry, in that he always stands with just a little bit of a slouch in his stance, even when there’s no ostensible reason for it. Jon’s always slouched a little, and when he decides to stand so straight that he looks like his spine might snap, Gerry can’t help but notice it.

Stammering a little, as if he’s suggesting they go commit a murder instead of what he’s _actually_ suggesting, Jon folds his arms across his chest and remarks, a little too lightly, “You… you could stay with me.”

Gerry blinks.

“If you like,” Jon says very hastily, which makes Gerry wonder just what it was that they managed to convey with that one, solitary blink, or just what sort of experience Jon’s had with people who make one, solitary blink in the past. He scratches self-consciously at his arm, with the hand that isn’t covered in burn scars. “While you, you find somewhere else to live. I don’t have the _largest_ flat in the world, but I think it could fit two people without much trouble. Or…”

Gerry should not tempt things. Gerry’s not certain what it is they’d _be_ tempting, whether it’s luck, fate, the unknowable eye god that likes to meddle in their life, the _End_ , or something else entirely, something they have no name for and no conception of. But Gerry’s also too curious for their own good, and their heart’s in their throat, and they’re really _not_ thinking clearly, and so they tilt their head to one side and echo “…Or?”

Jon mutters something Gerry can’t make out, and here’s a moment when they _dearly_ wish that the Beholding would randomly grant them the ability to record audio with their mind and tease it apart later to make intelligible the unintelligible, and _damn_ the cost to them as a person. The Beholding’s given them such gifts before, and though Gerry’s never liked the strings attached to them, those gifts have served them well when they’re needed. But Gerry gets the impression that when the Beholding gives them these gifts, it’s because they’re in a situation where they could easily die without them, and they’re too good a food source for the Beholding to let them die, _just_ yet—not ripe yet, after all. This is no such situation, and Jon’s probably counted as food for a little while later than Gerry. What was unintelligible to start with _remains_ unintelligible.

Gerry bites back a spate of high-pitched, giddy laughter, though they wind up biting their tongue in the process as well. “I’ll… I’ll think about it?” And yeah, that is _definitely_ choked this time.

“It’ll be a few days before you have to make a decision on where you’re staying, anyways,” Jon replies, and the relief in his voice is so palpable that Gerry feels like it’s _touching_ them.

Gerry makes the decision, right then, to go into the women’s restroom. The walls are made of concrete. Jon probably won’t be able to hear them hyperventilating in there.


	6. Chapter Six

As the afternoon lengthens on towards five o’clock, Jon expects the traffic to get worse. He’s heard the horror stories of the sort of commutes people here have from home to work and work to home, and he would _expect_ the interstate to become some congealed, congested disaster full of cars and lorries and tractor trailers and thick, noxious clouds of smog. He’s been here a while, at this point, but he’s never been on an interstate at rush hour. He doesn’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but he knows full well what it is he’s _expecting_.

Five in the afternoon descends upon them, and the interstate does not become a sea of cars crawling down the lanes. Five in the afternoon creeps up upon them, and suddenly, startlingly, the amount of traffic on the roads begins to thin. More and more cars start getting off at exits instead of staying on the roads, and fewer cars are getting off of the exits onto the highway. At one point, for a few moments, Jon is driving down the highway, and he realizes with a start that he can't see any other cars on the highway with them. There are none in front, none behind, and the median separating the northbound and southbound lanes is so thick with tall, spindly pine trees that even if the southbound lane was practically bristling with cars, Jon wouldn’t be able to tell.

He’s not alone in noticing. Gerry’s spent the past couple of hours in some sort of strange funk, slouched so low in their seat that the crown of their head barely passes over the bottom of the car window, but when those strange moments find them, they sit up a little straighter in their seat, frowning at the empty road ahead of them. Head tilted to the side, soon pressed up against the glass of the window, they murmur absently, as if working through a dream, “The roads used to get like this when I was running around with Gertrude. At night, usually, and usually not a highway like this one.

“We’d be driving down the road, and suddenly, I’d look around, and I wouldn’t see any cars. No cars, no shops or exits, no houses, no people.” Gerry folds their body a little tighter towards the door, pressing the side of their head a little tighter against the window. Staring straight ahead, they go on, “It was… You know, it was really weird? It wasn’t like I’d never been somewhere there aren’t a whole lot of people, but everything’s so much more spread out here than at home. There’d be no people around us, no signs of life for miles, and I’d wonder if maybe we’d wandered into one of those…” They make a frustrated noise in the back of their throat. “…Those places the Lukases dump people who annoy them. But then I’d wonder how Gertrude could still be there with me if I had wound up there, and then I’d look over to the right and there’d be a cow in the pasture and I’d stop thinking about it.”

The car crests a steep hill, and from there, they can see, a couple of miles off, a blue pickup trundling along the same lane as them.

Gerry waves a hand at the car, gesticulating at their suddenly-present prop. “Just like that,” they say firmly. “Just like that, the spell’s broken, and we’re back on a normal highway again.” They frown up at the afternoon sky. “The sky would still be like that, though. Big. Bigger than big. I’ve seen a lot of Vast bullshit since I came here, and honestly, I’m surprised I haven’t seen more. Sky like that, all the time, you keep waiting for it to swallow everything in sight.”

Once, what feels like a lifetime ago, Jon read out a statement given by a woman who had the distinctly unpleasant experience of watching the sky eat her son. It wasn’t one of the ones he paid much mind to, either at the time that he read it, or since. Just a few moments to remember her name, though: Moira Kelly. He hadn’t taken it seriously at the time, and it didn’t help that Martin, fresh from Jane Prentiss-inflicted captivity, had come tearing into his office just as he was wrapping up. Just another poor person whose travails he had scoffed at, though at _least_ she hadn’t been around for him to scoff at her in person.

But these past few months, after he met Michael Crew in particular, Jon’s found his mind drifting back to the account given in that statement from time to time. On top of everything _else_ he’s been dealing with, he’s found himself trying to visualize what it must have looked like, when the sky ate Moira Kelly’s son. He doesn’t _want_ to be visualizing this. He doesn’t _want_ to be imagining this, especially doesn’t want to imagine what happened to the man after the sky swallowed him and left nothing behind for his mother to try to grab onto. The images, imagined as they are, won’t leave his mind, no matter how little Jon wants to be imagining them at all. The only thing there is to do is wait for it to run its course, wait for the rippling sky to leave his mind’s eye, and wait for a moment when he can think of something else.

“I… I would rather not think about the sky swallowing us, if you don’t mind,” Jon says at last, trying and failing to smile in a way that doesn’t come off as completely, grotesquely fake. He can’t see his face as he’s smiling, but he just _knows_ the smile must look about as natural as Nikola’s weird plastic face had looked during that, that _month_ that Jon spent becoming much more closely acquainted with her than he had _ever_ wanted to be.

However fake the smile might be, to Gerry, it seems to be nothing that would draw their attention unduly. They shrug their shoulders and mutter, “Fine. Cool. Whatever.” And then they turn their attention entirely back to the window.

Jon tries to catch sight of their reflection in the window, suddenly unreasonably worried about what he might see in Gerry’s face when he gets that secondhand, translucent sight. There’s a glimpse there, in the dusty, streaked glass of the window, not a clear and unsullied reflection like what you’d see in a mirror, but enough to go on that Jon can at least _see_ something.

Doesn’t look terribly cheerful, but then, Jon can’t remember a single moment when Gerry’s looked ‘terribly cheerful,’ not in all the, the _hours_ that he’s known them, and it’s not like Gerry’s got a whole lot to be ‘terribly cheerful’ _about_. Doesn’t look terribly cheerful, but at least they don’t look _angry_ or actively upset.

Jon was a little surprised when Gerry started talking, actually. He’s pretty sure it’s his own fault—he _definitely_ came on too strong with the offer for Gerry to stay with him until they find a place of their own, and if Gerry gathered what he had barely cut himself off from saying after it…

Came on too strong. Came on _way_ too strong, and who knows what’s going through Gerry’s mind now, stuck in a car with someone who came on way, _way_ too strong, when they’ve known each other for less than a day—less than twelve hours, maybe, though Jon’s not entirely certain on what time of morning it was when he was ushered into the hotel room where Gerry was being kept.

Well, Jon’s just going to have to… not come on too strong, he supposes? His last experience of anything like this was with Georgie, and generally speaking, if anyone was ‘coming on’ in any sense of the word, whether it was too strong, too weak, or anywhere in between, it was Georgie, and…

…And Jon frowns, because that is a _weird_ place for his mind to be going about someone he’s known for less than a day. Again, Jon’s only experience of anything like this was with Georgie, and things did _not_ move that quickly with him and Georgie; it had been weeks before Jon had had the faintest inkling that things even could be moving in that direction. It doesn’t… It doesn’t feel wrong in his mind, though. It doesn’t feel the way some other things feel, like alien thoughts and sensations sitting on top of what’s there naturally. It just feels like, like him. He… he doesn’t really know what that says about him.

The clouds that ruled over the sky this morning broke away hours ago to reveal blue beneath, but the blue of day can’t persist forever. Five o’clock comes and goes, and the sky that was blue begins to transform. Gold slips in around the edges, around the western horizon, edging out to north and south. Then red, then indigo, and some clouds start to move back in, from the east this time, and rust-red clouds are streaked across an indigo sky, reminding Jon of nothing so much as a mottled bruise as day finally gives way to evening, as evening starts to give way to night, and the first of the stars begin to wink into existence out of the deep, deep blue pooling in the east.

There are still some moments, fleeting now, when Jon can’t quite believe the situation. Can’t believe that _the_ Gerard Keay is A) alive, and B) sitting next to him in his car. But they are fleeting, mostly dead now that he’s actually _met_ Gerry and a good number of the illusions he had built up in his head before meeting them have been swept away in favor of reality. Jon’s _trying_ to push them down, kill them if he can. Whenever he veers off into that area he starts to sound like a groupie, and Jon hasn’t _not_ been mortified to sound like a groupie, either out loud or in his head, since he was about nineteen (Not that he hasn’t occasionally slipped into groupie-mode when he meets someone he’s been waiting _years_ to meet, and thought he never would, and yeah, that is exactly the situation he’s in now).

They’re just, just a person. The way Jurgen Leitner was just a person, though Gerry’s shown no sign of either towering arrogance, overweening pride, or fatal hubris. Not quite the way so many of the avatars have turned out to be just people when you learn more about them, since Jon can’t tell if Gerry _is_ an avatar, properly an avatar—and if he’s being very honest with himself, doesn’t particularly _want_ to think of Gerry as an avatar; it feels like an insult, or something that goes deeper than an insult and starts to approach the territory of a _wound_ , to try and speculate on whether Gerry is properly human, Gerry who was tossed into the world they both inhabit as a child and never had any choice about being a part of it. But they’re just… You know, they’re just a _person_.

(Later, a little while later, some questions of _Gerry’s_ will be answered, and Gerry will stare at him long and hard with a strange, strained expression on their face that Jon doesn’t understand, not until they ask him softly, terribly gently, what choice he really thinks _he_ had.

_‘More of a choice than you.’_

_‘Are you really sure about that?’_

Yes, Jon is. Jon could have chosen not to accept the position, could have opened his eyes for five minutes and thought about the fact that of everyone Elias could have chosen as Gertrude’s replacement, him, Martin, Tim, and, and _Sasha_ , Jon had been in the Institute the shortest amount of time, that Tim and Sasha both had qualifications that he didn’t, that Martin might have falsified nearly everything on his CV, but he had still managed to stay in the position and learn everything he needed to do on the job, without anyone ever really catching on to the fact that he had come into the job knowing nothing—Jon, even at his lowest opinion of Martin, never thought worse of him than regarding him as mildly incompetent, and never thought for a _moment_ that it could be that Martin had falsified his qualifications, which is… Yes, that does speak a _lot_ to Martin’s ability to learn thing on the fly.

On paper, Jon is probably the least-qualified of any of the four of them for the chair that Gertrude once occupied, and as regards to Gertrude’s job duties regarding preventing the apocalypse, Jon was… Jon _is_ probably the least qualified there, as well. And Jon, not once, never even _once_ thought about why it was that he was being promoted over all three of them, when they had all been there longer than him, when their qualifications were more well-tuned to becoming an archivist in a _normal_ institution than his. Elias had wanted someone he could lead down the garden path without any fuss, that was all, and any of the three of them would have been warier regarding his intentions.

_‘What about the book? What about the spider?’_ Gerry will ask him, and the casual curiosity in their voice is belied by the way their eyes dart all over Jon’s face. _‘What were you supposed to do, just never read a book?’_

He could have acceded to his grandmother’s requests and just read books the way a _normal_ child would have read books, could have actually read more than one book by the same author and not turned his nose up whenever something remotely similar to something he had read before came his way. He could have actually read something appropriate for his age, instead of picking up what looked like a normal picture book, something intended for a four- or five-year-old child instead of a kid Jon’s age at the time, and never even opened up the Leitner.

Gerry won’t look convinced by that argument. Gerry _will_ look like they’re planning on having a nice, long argument with him about it later. But Gerry will let it drop at that, and Jon will have to deal with the feeling of eyes boring into his back for the rest of the afternoon.)

But Jon has met Gerard Keay—no, he’s met _Gerry_ , and he’s found a, a _person_. Just a relatively _normal_ person (Jon’s definition of ‘normal’ isn’t quite what it used to be, but compared to the likes of Jude and Jane Prentiss, Gerry is completely, incredibly, _refreshingly_ normal) who’s just trying to navigate their way through a world that isn’t normal at all without getting killed. They’re just a normal person, but one who seems…

Well, who could possibly be expected to be _okay_ , after that sort of life?

Jon’s not going to push. He wants to, really, _really_ wants to, and he can’t tell how much of that is his own, native curiosity, and how much of it is the thing living inside of his head, the thing that might be as much him as everything that made up him before he became the Archivist, the thing that might be _more_ him than everything that made him up before he became the Archivist. He’s not going to push. Gerry seems the sort of person who wouldn’t think much of pushing back, and they should probably avoid that while they’re both still in a moving car. And it sort of feels like, like _cheating_. If they’re supposed to be friends, now, then Gerry can reveal more of what’s gone on in their life on their own terms. No pushing. People don’t like it when Jon pushes, anyways.

Night falls, and Jon keeps driving. Given everything they’ve indicated so far, Gerry would probably prefer that they keep on driving until it’s time to find somewhere to sleep, and honestly, Jon’s inclined towards that path now, as well. Trevor and Julia might well still be in a forest somewhere, hunting down their unfortunate prey, but Jon feels stiff as a wooden plank after driving pretty much all day long, and he thinks that if he stops now, even if it is for food, he might not be able to get back in the car and drive another hundred miles to a hotel. If Jon is to stop somewhere, he’d like it to be where he _stops_ , at least for the night. Heavier lunch than he’s had in a while, even if it was preceded by a good, long while of involuntary fasting, he’s not even all that hungry. And if Gerry’s hungry, they’ve said not one word regarding it.

Night falls, daylight colors peeling away from the sky, and those stars fortunate enough to shine wherever there isn’t cloud twinkle down on the still quite-thin number of motorists out on the highway. Jon’s completely given up on trying not to be flowery—spending nearly an entire day driving has worn down some of his barriers and this, unfortunately, is one of them. The interstate at night feels like he’s been transported to somewhere completely alien. Jon’s driving experience being as limited as it is, and Jon being the sort of person who’s always gone out of his way to avoid driving at night when he has to drive at all, he can’t precisely say if he likes it or not. The interstate isn’t lit with lamps at night, not like other roads that Jon has known. There are no lamps, and what little moon they might have had is totally obscured by cloud. Jon feels as if wrapped almost wholly in dark, the only relief from that darkness the feeble light cast by his own headlamps. Far off ahead of him, red pinpricks of light shine in the dark like stars, except they shiver and brighten and dim intermittently, and stars thus reveal themselves as brake lights. Still, the median between the northbound and southbound lanes is thick with pine trees, excepting thin dirt tracks where only police cars and service vehicles are allowed to sit. Light shines between the tree trunks, sometimes, a pale, flickering, incandescent light that seems unconnected to any car, though Jon knows logically that they must be headlamps, shining in the dark. All around them there sits a heavy, eerie silence.

So yes, Jon’s being flowery, and no, he doesn’t think it suits him very well. It feels about as natural to him as the diction of the statement-givers feels on his tongue when he reads out what they’ve left behind for him—which is to say, it all feels natural in the moment, sometimes feels more natural than his _own_ diction, his own vocabulary and chosen verbal grammar, but then, the moment passes, and the memory of it all feeling natural remains, but it coexists with the reality that it wasn’t natural at all, and ‘coexisting’ might not be quite the right word for it, considering how the two concepts clash and clamor against each other in Jon’s mind.

A lot of things don’t suit Jon very well (Or suit him too well, so well that he wishes he could take a spoon and dig them out of his body, the way he used to dig chunks of strawberry out of his cereal when he was a child). He has to deal with them, anyways.

Beside him, Gerry is totally silent. At some point after night fell, they eased their posture somewhat. No longer pressed quite so tightly against the door, instead, they’ve stretched their body out as far as the limited space within the car allows, arms folded across their chest but otherwise looking almost relaxed. Sometimes, Jon thinks they might have even fallen asleep, but then, dark eyes flicker open and peer ahead of them into the dark.

Or, rather, Gerry’s totally silent, until they aren’t.

“Jon?” Gerry catches his eye, before nodding at the digital clock mounted to the dashboard. The fluorescent green letters sear the dark, reading ‘9:03.’ “Are you… are you getting tired?”

His back is killing him and he’s starting to get the sort of headache he sometimes gets when he’s been staring at the same thing for too long without a break. “A bit.”

“There’s…” It’s too dark to tell for certain, but Jon thinks Gerry’s frowning. “There’s a town about ten, fifteen miles off. We can stop there. There’s some stuff I need to get, anyways,” they add, in the sort of tone like they’re trying to be casual, but are actually afraid they’ll be considered frivolous for wanting to pick this stuff up in the first place—and before anyone calls Jon out for being overly specific, he has firsthand experience of that tone of voice; he knows it when he hears it. “I don’t know how long the hotels stay open, anyways.”

The cheapest of roadside hotels stay open twenty-four hours a day, but Jon’s not going to tell Gerry that. He really doesn’t want to be stuck driving until three in the morning.

After a few miles, Jon starts to see a luminescent, multi-hued glow on the horizon that he might have taken for the sun rising, several hours early, were it not for the fact that he’s still driving north and hasn’t taken a turn east in _quite_ a while. It’s… Well, it is a break from the monotony of the past few hours. The last time they drove through a city, it was about five-thirty; since then, there hasn’t even been the slightest glow of lights off to the east or the west to signal any life beyond the other motorists.

Jon gets off of the first exit that leads straight into the city—regardless of what Gerry called it, by the time they’ve gotten close enough that Jon can get a close look, it’s clearly a _city_ , not a town—which might have been a mistake, since it puts them on the outskirts, on a somewhat rundown street full of dollar stores and dark and shuttered storefronts, each of which was probably once something that was _not_ a dollar store. A mistake on Jon’s part, but Gerry seems to know where to go, regardless. They give directions, and Jon turns left and right, and left again, and then right, right, right, until they’re driving down a four-lane road and Gerry’s pointing at a large, low building they want Jon to pull in at.

“A… a military surplus store?” Jon asks blankly, feeling like the world’s biggest idiot to have to say it aloud, but here he is, _saying it out loud_. He doesn’t really know what else to say. They’ve just pulled up into the parking lot of a military surplus store, an old, crumbling concrete block of a building painted a dull green, with bars over the windows and some strange, murky-looking netting acting as some poor excuse for curtains just behind the windows. It’s not the sort of place Jon would expect to be open at this time of night, but sure enough, the harsh white fluorescent lights are still on inside.

It’s not the sort of place Jon had expected Gerry would lead him to, and yet, here they are.

“A military surplus store,” Gerry confirms, sounding something terrifyingly close to chipper, which is _not_ a tone of voice Jon ever expected to hear coming out of their mouth. The quick, furtive sentence that follows, “I’ll explain when we get back in here; don’t ask any questions when we’re in the shop,” is much more like what Jon expects.

“If… if you insist.”

“I do. Let’s go.”

They don’t spend too long in the military surplus store, which Jon can only count as a good thing. He doesn’t know what it is, exactly, but spending time in a shop with so many weapons and so much military gear makes him feel like his skin’s trying to break out into a rash. What Gerry does is pick out two military knives—Jon thinks he heard the man who gets them out of the case for them call them a ka-bar—pay for them, and then motion for Jon to follow them out of the store. Jon is only too happy to oblige.

Not that he doesn’t have a _wealth_ of questions for Gerry once they get back into the car.

Jon’s questions, however, go swallowed up inside of his mouth, because the moment Jon puts the keys in the ignition, Gerry starts to rip the stickers and other wrappings off of the knives. “You know how to use one of these things?” they ask, waving one of the—thankfully sheathed—knives the moment they manage to pull it free of all of its wrappings.

A jittery laugh escapes Jon’s mouth. “What kind of a question is _that_?”

Gerry squints. “Is that a ‘no,’ then?”

“ _Yes_.”

A short, sharp shrug. “Just a question. I use knives for self-defense—well,” Gerry mutters, gritting their teeth, “I use knives for self-defense when I haven’t got people taking away my knives. The blades on these are made of steel, but you can get ceramic knives if you’ve got to go somewhere with metal detectors. We’ll have to ditch them before we get to the airport, but you should take—“ and _now_ , Gerry’s trying to press the first knife they got out of its wrapping into Jon’s hand “—one of these and hold onto it.”

It’s late. It’s late, it’s been a _long_ time since Gerry last slept, and perhaps their concentration just starts to break a little when they’re tired. That would make sense. It would explain why Gerry doesn’t seem to have _heard_ him. Jon gingerly takes the knife by its leather sheath. He’s, he’s handled weapons before, and it didn’t end well for him, not at _all_. It feels an awful lot like this knife might rear back and bite him, and Jon doesn’t know how he feels about that. A knife so new that someone had to rip it out of the wrapping probably hasn’t had _time_ to become sufficiently eldritch to do something like that, but still.

And as for what Gerry seems to have forgotten…

“Gerry, I just told you, I don’t know how to use a knife.”

“And that—“ in the weak light cast down upon them by the interior lights in the car, Gerry looks positively _manic_ “—is why I’m gonna teach you how to knife-fight.”

_That sounds like a horrible idea_ , Jon thinks.

“…Okay,” Jon says.

It still sounds like a horrible idea. Jon tries to imagine himself _knife-fighting_ , and the only thing he can imagine is him accidentally stabbing himself while trying to stab somebody else. But fatigue is getting to him, fatigue has _got_ to be getting to him, and _because_ fatigue has got to be getting to him, it also sounds kind of—

Whatever. If Jon accidentally stabs himself while Gerry tries to teach him to knife-fight, he likes to think that Gerry will call an ambulance for him. So long as another one of Gerry’s hobbies doesn’t turn out to be home medicine and amateur surgery, anyways.

…Jon really hopes amateur surgery doesn’t turn out to be one of Gerry’s hobbies.

“Alright.” Jon puts the knife down in the little compartment in the driver’s side door. He’s hardly going to need it while he’s _driving,_ anyways. “Where are we going next?”

“Walmart. I need fresh clothes, along with some other stuff. I…” Gerry stares down at their own knife, brow deeply furrowed. “…I don’t think we can take these in there, either.”

“Probably not,” Jon says wryly. He’s suddenly entertaining a mental image of the two of them surrounded by Walmart employees armed with whatever they could find in the sports department. It’s… an interesting mental image. A little funny. Certainly wouldn’t end well for either of them, but it is a little funny.

Jon hasn’t had much experience of Walmarts, let alone a Walmart at half-past nine in the evening. It’s… He’d be lying if he said it wasn’t a little eerie. Harsh white fluorescent light seems a little unnatural at any time of day, in any place, but in such a massive space, in the dark of the night, the effect is only intensified. In a larger city, there might be more people here at this time of night, or perhaps if it was more centrally located, but as it stands, there are only a few customers in here, and only a few more employees than them. _Gerry_ doesn’t seem to mind how few people there are—the few people who are here all stare at them as if they’ve never seen anything like them, which is thoroughly unfair, even if Jon can guess that people who look like they haven’t bathed or washed their clothes in the past several days is perhaps not the most common sight in this particular Walmart—but to Jon, it’s a massive space with too few people inside of it, and whenever they walk out of sight of any of the other customers or employees, it’s bizarrely easy to think that they’re the only two people in here at all.

“Don’t say anything,” Gerry mutters defensively, as they pull a few brightly-colored, garishly-patterned shirts off of the racks.

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Jon assures them, trying not to smile.

Less than convinced, Gerry hunches their shoulders as they stuff the shirts into their plastic shopping basket. “I don’t just wear all black, all the time. Wearing one color all the time with nothing else if you’ve actually got a choice is _stupid_.”

“I didn’t _say_ anything.”

“You were thinking it.”

“I wasn’t!”

“Yes, you were.”

Suddenly, Gerry pokes Jon’s forehead with their forefinger. Jon blinks in frank confusion, and Gerry themselves seems to regard this as having been just a step too far in the direction of— They seem to regard this has having been just a step too far, for they jerk their hand back and let it fall down, limp, at their side. “Sorry.” They’re not looking at Jon, not exactly; it’s more that their gaze is going somewhere just over the crown of Jon’s head. “You know, I never liked it when Mum did that.”

Jon can feel something hard and cold fall into the pit of his stomach, at the same time that he finds his curiosity piqued. “Did what?”

Gerry doesn’t shrug. Jon was expecting it, but it never comes. Still staring just over the top of his head, “Just… She’d just touch me, you know? When she was angry.” Their mouth quirks in an unhappy frown—unhappier than you would expect from a baseline frown, that is. “She had… She was angry a lot.”

Jon makes a mental note, just now, to avoid bringing up Mary Keay to her child, if he can help it. It sounds like the sort of thing you could use to fill up a book. It sounds like the sort of thing you could use to give people nightmares. It sounds like the sort of thing that would fill Jon anew with impotent, useless anger, something he can never use in any meaningful way, something that can do nothing but burn inside him until it corrodes everything it sits next to. If it was just him, he’s not certain he would care about the anger. But Gerry… This isn’t some hypothetical exercise for Gerry. It’s their life.

“I don’t mind it,” he says quietly. It’s half-true. Jon doesn’t particularly appreciate being touched like that without warning; they had prodded his forehead pretty hard, as it happens. But there was no, no malice behind it, and judging by Gerry’s demeanor, it’s unlikely to happen again. It doesn’t hurt to say that he doesn’t mind it. So long as Gerry doesn’t realize that it’s only half-true, anyways.

Gerry doesn’t realize that it’s only half-true, anyways. They practically deflate, though they’re still not looking Jon straight in the eye. “Come on,” they mutter, sinking straight back down into the funk they’d been stuck in for much of the afternoon. “I’m not done here yet.”

They go for a set of apparently random items—some seem connected to one or another items, but some of them seem connected to _all_. The art supplies section yields up a sketchbook and a set of artist’s pens, items Gerry both derides as being typically cheap in a cheap shopping center, but the best they’ve got access to until they can get back to their preferred shops. Jon wouldn’t know cheap art supplies from high-quality art supplies if it came up to him and slapped him—the most he can tell you is that he knows Crayola is cheap, and that is _it_. A pair of jeans and some other clothes. A hairbrush, a bottle of acetaminophen, and a pair of hair scissors. Things like that.

While all this is going on, Jon has his phone out, scrolling through the listings of nearby hotels, looking for something that looks like it has beds that wouldn’t completely break his back to little pieces. He’s probably going to have to borrow from that bottle of acetaminophen even if he can find a soft bed, and without one… Gerry can’t drive, and Jon’s not going to be able to drive tomorrow morning, _either_ , if he has to sleep on some mattress with lumps in it or a mattress with the thickness of a sheet of paper, so there’s a good chance they might not even be able to _try_ to get to an airport tomorrow, if Gerry’s even able to get a ticket that would see them through the gates that same day. The _point_ is, Jon would like somewhere a bit more comfortable to sleep than where he’s been sleeping—or not sleeping, might be a bit more accurate—these past few nights. Nowhere too fancy— _that_ always makes Jon feel like he’s trespassing—but somewhere nice enough that Elias, who has among _many_ other things proven himself to be a raging cheapskate these past few months, might be roused to complain about the expense. That would be nice.

Certainly, Elias can’t possibly complain about the expense of the places Jon’s been _eating_ , lately. There is one restaurant in this Walmart, and it turns out to be a McDonald’s. While eating a burger containing something that can only ambiguously be identified as _meat_ , let alone _beef_ , Jon thinks back upon his greasy Arby’s lunch with the sort of longing he never, ever thought he would be feeling over something like Arby’s. Gerry comes out of their funk a little bit with food, though, and even if them coming out of their funk consists primarily of hissing complaints about the frankly soggy chips in just low enough a tone of voice that the cashier standing about twenty feet away from their cheap, plastic booth won’t hear, at least they’re talking properly again.

As they throw their trash away, Gerry’s chewing on the inside of their left cheek, pallid skin warping visibly around the track laid down by their teeth. “I don’t think we—“ by ‘we’, Jon assumes they mean them and Gertrude; somehow, Jon can’t see Gerry being okay about stopping here for the night if that ‘we’ also encompassed Julia and Trevor “—stopped here when we were passing through. Gertrude—“ there it is “—wanted to keep going. I _think_ I can figure out where there’s a hotel, but—“

And at that, Jon smiles. “I’ve already found a place.”

Gerry blinks. “When?”

“When you were in line rolling your eyes at the woman in line in front of you.”

“Those coupons weren’t for that sort of yogurt,” Gerry fires back, though their eyes are darting in such a way as if they expect the woman who had spent the better part of fifteen minutes arguing with an incredibly long-suffering cashier to materialize right in front of them and start arguing the point with _them_. “You really did find a hotel, though?” they ask, sounding downright _hopeful_.

“ _Yes_.”

Gerry nods at the automatic doors leading back out into the poorly-lit Walmart parking lot. “Lead the way.”

About ten minutes later, Gerry’s standing out beside the car, blinking up at the multi-story dun-colored building in front of them. “It’s…” The hotel parking lot is considerably better-lit than the Walmart parking lot had been, and Jon gets a good, long look at Gerry, staring up at the mid-grade hotel with some strange mixture of disbelief and longing on their face. “It’s not half-bad.”

“I’m really sick of Motel 6s,” Jon says honestly.

Gerry, who at this point has probably spent more time in Motel 6s than anyone alive who doesn’t _work_ in one, ducks their head and snorts. “It definitely doesn’t look like a place where people would just roll over and go back to bed if they heard us screaming. Good job.”

It sounds sarcastic. Jon probably shouldn’t be smiling. He smiles, anyways.

His smile fades a little as they approach the lobby, and he gets a look at Gerry under the nearest lamp set up on the sidewalk. “Erm… Gerry?”

“Hmm?”

“I… I know what you said, about how we shouldn’t go anywhere by ourselves, but maybe you had better let me go in there by, by myself. They’d probably…”

Jon never finishes that sentence. Gerry spares him from having to finish it by taking a look at themselves in their warped, distant reflection in the highly-polished glass of the door some fifteen feet off, and grimacing. “Yeah… That wouldn’t go over so great. Probably don’t want them getting a good look at me until _after_ you’ve gotten the key. But Jon?” They falter a little, before pointing backwards towards the car. “Once you’re done in there…” They suck in a breath, faltering a little more, before offering a twitching little smile—preemptive peace offering, maybe?—and going on, “Maybe you wanna move the car? Where it is now, I think you can see it from the road.”

The idea of getting back into the driver’s seat of the car for even five seconds, let alone the couple of minutes it would take to find a more remote parking spot, sounds about as attractive to Jon as going back to Nikola and telling her that actually, yes, she _can_ tell him more about her most-recommended skin care routines. The idea of Gerry being caught and dragged back into captivity by the hunters because Jon left his car where it could be seen from the road and they were able to use that to track them down, however unlikely it is that they’d catch up to them here while they’re _still_ here, is even less attractive. He’ll move the car.

Soon enough, the key is obtained, the car is moved, and Jon and Gerry are shifting their belongings inside the hotel building itself, Gerry skirting the edges of the walls the avoid what they no doubt think would be the judgmental glance of the woman manning the front desk—and honestly, Jon can’t even blame them for that, since Gerry’s… _untidy_ appearance probably would draw some comment in a hotel like this. It’s hardly a five-star hotel, but it’s nice enough that anyone working at it would probably expect the guests not to be absolutely filthy when they first show up. Not fair, considering _why_ Gerry looks like that, but it’s what they have to deal with.

But soon enough after that, they’re in the hotel room (“Third floor?” “…Yes, I hope that’s…” “It’s fine. If they get in here, there wouldn’t really be any _good_ place, but at least they can’t access the third floor from the front door or get in through a window, and we’d probably hear the screaming before they got to us.” “That’s…” “Yeah.”), and there’s no more chances for hotel employees or other guests to stare down their noses at Gerry’s unkempt appearance. Accordingly, Gerry’s posture relaxes _considerably_ as Jon secures the latch on the comfortingly heavy door.

As far as mid-grade hotels Jon has stayed in over the course of his life, this one is pretty standard. There are two twin-sized beds with a pair of bedside tables situated in between them. The beds are identically dressed in cream-colored duvets, and the tables are set with identical lamps with squat, white porcelain bodies and greenish-yellow canvas shades. The curtains over the window are white, the wallpaper is this pale golden color patterned with dark red flowers, there’s a large television set on a low wooden table on the opposite wall from the beds, and an interior door opens on the hotel room bathroom, which is just _blindingly_ white. Even with all of the overhead lights on, it’s still a bit dim in the main room itself, shadows gathering at the corners like dust missed by the housekeepers when they’re vacuuming. It’s the perfect intersection of being moderately hospitable while also being completely and totally impersonal. Jon wouldn’t be surprised if hotel rooms like these are deliberately designed to be both welcoming, and the sort of place that reminds you every moment that this is not a place where people _live_.

However it might feel like a place where people don’t _live_ , Gerry wastes no time making themselves at home. They dump all of their things on the bed further from the front door and closer to the bathroom door, digging through their crinkly Walmart bags for some of the clean clothes they bought, as well as the hair scissors. After a few minutes struggling to get the hair scissors out of the packaging, cursing under their breath all the while, Gerry shoves the mangled plastic packaging into the little tin waste bin and takes a change of clothes, one of the now-empty plastic bags, and the hair scissors into the bathroom with them.

Without even bothering to shut the door—it’s not spying if they haven’t shut the door, and Jon would have looked away if they were doing anything other than what they’re doing now, so please leave him alone—Gerry picks up the pair of hair scissors, which looks frankly entirely too small for their long, long-fingered, spindly hands, and starts to cut through their thick, matted braid.

“I’m sick of long hair,” they say by way of explanation, as they struggle against snags and tangles and just how incredibly _thick_ their hair is. Jon watches Gerry glare at their reflection, snarling as the scissors just outright get _stuck_ in their hair. “I’m fucking _sick_ of long hair, and I don’t want to look at it any—“ the scissors get unstuck “— _more_.” And after a few more furious snips of the scissors, they manage to cut all the way through.

Gerry holds the hair scissors in one hand, and the long, frayed braid of what was once the better part of their hair in the other, a look of something close to triumph on their face, though it’s soon replaced with chagrin as they peer more closely at their face and hair in the mirror. Their hair’s cut choppily just above their shoulders, where it now hangs, lank and grimy and still reminding Jon of nothing quite so much as a tarnished spoon, and for all that Gerry insisted that they were sick of long hair, something about this doesn’t seem quite right, either.

“I might have taken off too much,” they mutter at last.

“What?”

“You’ll see.”

And with that, Gerry shuts the door firmly in Jon’s face, locks it, and soon afterwards, there echoes the screech of the bathtub faucet turning on, and water pounding on the bathtub floor.

Gerry stays in there a long time.

While Jon’s left alone in the main area of their hotel room, he considers turning on the television and flipping through the channels, trying to find something that could at least hold his attention while he’s waiting. He’s never been much of a television-watcher, either as a child or as an adult, but there has to be _something_ that could entertain him for half an hour or so, mustn’t there be?

Yeah, about that. Half of the channels listed on the guide just give off static when Jon flips to them, and the other half are either distinctly grainy, occasionally splicing sounds and images from the next channel over, or are things like cooking shows or public auctions or sports events or everything else that Jon does _not_ care to watch. As a last ditch attempt to find _something_ halfway-tolerable, he turns to the children’s cartoon channel listed on the guide, but though the channel is displaying properly, what’s playing at the moment is so brain-meltingly _asinine_ that Jon just turns off the television altogether and flops down onto his bed with the sort of aggravated groan he doesn’t think he’s heard out of his own mouth since he was about fifteen.

Jon can hear, however muffled it might be, noises from outside of the hotel room. The little thumps of footsteps in the hall outside, the louder thumps of footsteps in the room just above theirs on the fourth floor, along with some staticky noise that sounds as if whoever is in that room had more success with the television than he did. Conversations that he can’t make out, but he knows are happening, because he can hear the flow and the ebb of voices, he can make out the differing tones and timbres and cadences and however else you’re supposed to describe a voice when you’re not being pushed to the evocative by—

It’s… strange. There’s signs of life all around him, but he can’t see any of it. He can hear footsteps, and voices. He can hear water rushing in the bathroom. But he’s alone, separate. It feels…

At length, there comes another discordant screech of metal on metal in the bathroom as Gerry turns the faucet off. After that, there’s several minutes of the _hideously_ loud static-noise of a hair dryer going. Jon stares discontentedly at the bathroom door, feeling even more like a petulant fifteen-year-old than he did before, except now he feels like a petulant, _impatient_ fifteen-year-old as well. He underestimated a little bit, earlier; not thirty minutes, but closer to forty. At least there’s no danger of all the hot water being gone, but still…

Something catches Jon’s eye.

Gerry’s left the battered old bag they took with them from the hotel zipped open. There are some odds and ends in there immediately visible now that the bag is open—old, worn-out clothes, an equally old, worn-out sketchbook that Jon would guess is completely full, if Gerry’s gone out and bought a new one, and what looks like a pair of trainers. There’s something else there too, though. Beneath a couple of rumpled shirts, there’s something else that Jon might have mistaken for a shirt, except the texture just seems a bit… wrong, for it.

It looks soft, whatever it is. Soft, and an indeterminate pinkish-brown color that makes Jon’s stomach turn, though he’s still trying to figure out why. Before he really knows what he’s doing—but that’s not really an excuse. Jon doesn’t quite know what he’s doing when he gets up from the bed, but he does know what he’s doing by the time he’s standing over the bag, one hand outstretched towards it.

Gerry probably wouldn’t appreciate him going through their things. The last experience Jon had of anything like that was Georgie stealing his tapes and refusing to give them back until he told her everything he didn’t want to say, everything she’d promised she wouldn’t _make_ him say, and that had felt… It had felt a little like ripping himself open with a blunt knife, actually. And no, he shouldn’t have been recording in her house, still, and he’d honestly had it coming for that, but that didn’t make it feel any _better_. It wasn’t a good experience, and he doesn’t want to put someone else through that, let alone someone like Gerry who’s obviously spent a _lot_ of time having far worse things happen to them, but there’s something clawing at his mind, and it won’t _stop_ clawing, and he can’t tell where it ends and he begins, and—

And it’s too late, because even without digging through the bag, he’s been looking at that patch of soft, pinkish-brown for long enough that he thinks he knows what it is.

Human skin has such a…

Well. You know it when you see it.

And now Jon has walked straight into a brick wall, because he’s desperate to ask, and he knows he can’t. Or rather, he _can_ , though he knows he shouldn’t. He doesn’t have much of a _right_ to ask, considering Gerry didn’t tell him about it, considering Gerry didn’t leave it out where he could have easily seen it without going to stand over the bag and peering down into it. No right, no right at all, and yet, he wants…

The bathroom door chooses that very moment to swing open. Jon chooses that very moment to jump back like a kid caught going through the candy drawer between mealtimes—and considering just how literal that might be, it’s not a comfortable thought at all.

Gerry steps through the door, wearing new clothes that includes a baggy t-shirt that’s just an _explosion_ of magenta and teal and bright, bright golden yellow, and their hair…

“Definitely cut off too much,” Gerry explains when they catch Jon staring. They snort, running their hands through their hair and tossing their head like an aggravated horse. “Been way too long since I took my hair out of the braid; I’d forgotten how much it draws up when it’s clean. And dry.” Jon keeps on looking, and they roll their dark eyes. “Yeah, yeah, go ahead and stare.”

Gerry’s hair is, it turns out, naturally _incredibly_ curly. Not the tight little corkscrews you see on some people, but wider, oblong loops interspersed within hair that, even though they’ve just gotten out of the shower, just gotten through blow-drying their hair and presumably brushing it as well, already looks seriously tangled. Actually, it looks tangled enough that maybe Gerry didn’t brush it, after all. Where their hair nearly brushed their shoulders before it was washed, now it brushes their jaw instead. It’s not an image Jon expected to see from someone who’s been consistently describe as looking, well, the way Gerry is described as looking in every single statement they appear in. It doesn’t suit them at all. And as for the color…

In every single statement Gerry appears in where anyone bothers to elaborate on their personal appearance, the statement-giver says that they have black hair. Many of them comment on the fact that their hair was obviously _dyed_ , and not naturally black. At the time, Jon had just assumed that Gerry was using the sort of cheap hair dye that makes black look sort of bluish or purplish. He’d occasionally supposed that maybe their roots were showing, or that they weren’t dying their eyebrows as well, and that that accounted for it. Jon never stopped to wonder if maybe their natural hair color accounted for how obvious it was to most people that their hair was dyed darker than it actually was.

When it was dirty, when it was grimy and dingy, when it clearly hadn’t been washed in days, maybe a week or two, the color of Gerry’s hair reminded Jon of a tarnished spoon. Now, it’s freshly-washed, and freshly dried, so that none of the darkness of water yet clings to it. Gerry’s natural hair color is a pale, silvery blond that, and Jon’s not certain whether ‘ironic’ is the right word for it, but he looks at Gerry’s pale, silvery hair, hair that looks darker or lighter depending on the angle or the position, but still is so very _pale_ , and he thinks that their natural hair color looks like it came out of a bottle as well.

It doesn’t suit them at all. That pale, pale blond, the sort of color you don’t see naturally in someone’s hair once they’re no longer a child, it doesn’t suit them at all, not the image Jon held in his head for so long in the time between when he first heard of Gerard Keay, and when he actually _met_ Gerry. But it matches their pallid skin—at least, the skin that isn’t warped and beset by rippling red scars that in this light look a little like they’re still on fire. Their silvery blond hair matches their pallid skin and their pale lips, and it doesn’t match their dark eyes or the dark rings around their dark eyes that only stand out more starkly for the fact that their skin is now completely clean, but not everything has to match, and in fact, very few things ever match completely. Gerard Keay was… an image. Gerard Keay was an image that built up and up and up in Jon’s mind, more like a figure from legend than an actual person. Gerry is something else entirely. Jon’s known Gerry for less than a day. He doesn’t know what suits Gerry and what doesn’t.

“It’s… It’s your hair,” he says at last, and it’s such a flimsy, lousy thing to say, but it’s what Jon’s saying, and he can think of nothing else _to_ say. “I don’t see that I have anything else to say about it.”

Gerry rolls their eyes, but gives no harsher reaction than that. “You’re _thinking_ something else about it. You’re not great at hiding it, Jon.”

“Just because I’m thinking it doesn’t mean I’m going to _say_ it.”

Gerry rolls their eyes again, but this time, they look at Jon long, and hard. They gnaw on their lower lip a little as they scour his face, and Jon’s stomach begins to churn hard and hot as the feeling of being seen, seen and found out, starts to settle more and more and more into his mouth.

“Have you been going through my stuff?” Gerry asks abruptly.

“No,” Jon answers, just a little too quickly.

At that, Gerry raises an eyebrow. “Have you been _looking_ at it?” They don’t _sound_ angry, but that’s going to be a ploy, _has_ to be, who would reveal that they were angry before they knew for certain what had happened.

Well, seeing as he’s dealing with a person who could just pull the information out of his head anyways, and just because lying would make him feel even guiltier, Jon sucks in a deep breath and says, only a little squeakily, “Yes.”

Gerry’s expression shutters, just a little bit. It’s not like watching a door get slammed in your face quite so much as it’s like watching someone half-closing the blinds over their window. You can still see a little way inside, but the whole of the sight is invisible to you, and what you’re really seeing are strips of color and shapes indistinguishable from such a vantage point. “Why?” It’s a simple question, but a clear one, as well.

Jon sucks in another breath, goes to sit on the edge of his bed. There have been other occasions, _plenty_ of other occasions, when his apologies have come too late and too feeble to make any sort of difference. Not… He’d like this to not be one of those times. So… “I’m sorry.”

But Gerry shakes their head violently, mouth twisting like they’re entertaining something strange in their mouth. “Erm… That’s not what I…” Eyebrow goes up again. “You’re being very overwrought,” they inform him frankly. “You were just looking at stuff I had _out on my bed_.”

Forget turning squeaky or mumbling; now, Jon’s _spluttering_. “I didn’t think you’d be too pleased that I was looking in your bag.”

Gerry looks at him a long moment, lips pressed tight together as if trying to figure something out, though Jon can’t begin to guess at what. After that moment has passed, they let out a long, explosive sigh, and go to sit down on the edge of their own bed. In clean clothes, clothes that fit their frame—evidently somewhat reduced since those worn, stained, ragged clothes they’d been wearing when Jon met them were new—body clean and hair clean, they look even more crane-like than they looked than they seemed to him when they first stepped out of the hotel room, into the gentle light of pre-dawn, into the harsh light of the fluorescent light fixtures that lit up the open-air walkway on the second floor of the hotel. “I was asking,” they say quietly, “what it was that was so interesting about my things.” Eyebrow goes up yet again. “Gertrude went through my stuff a couple of times, not long after I started working with her. Don’t remember her ever asking permission first. _Really_ don’t remember her ever getting squeamish about it.”

There’s a detour. Even if it’s a short one, Jon’s grateful to be able to ride down it, for however long he can. “Gertrude went through your things?” They were traveling together, weren’t they? Hypocritical to say, certainly, but that doesn’t sound like something likely to engender _trust_. “Why?”

At this, Gerry shifts their weight uncomfortably on the bed. Chewing on the inside of their cheek once more, they mumble something unintelligible, before screwing up their face and admitting, “I… I was still hunting down Leitners when I worked with her. She had a rule—I wasn’t supposed to bring them into the Archives. Apparently Mum used to bring her old ones in before I was born, or something like that—Gertrude wasn’t very clear on _who_ was bringing the books in there, exactly, but either Mum brought the books in, or she was letting somebody else bring the books in, and…” Gerry shrugs. “…Weird shit happened.”

Jon takes a moment to wonder what sort of thing could stand out enough to Gerry to warrant that sort of designation. After that moment of wondering, and failing to settle on anything sufficiently bizarre, he hazards to ask dubiously, “What kind of ‘weird shit?’”

Gerry snorts. “Gertrude wasn’t very clear on _that_ , either. But, you know… _Leitners_. Weird enough that she didn’t want anything like it in the Archives again if she could avoid it. I…” They shrink a little, shoulders hunched and spine almost telescoping, folding in on itself as much as a human spine is capable of, which is to say not at all, but somehow managing it anyways. “I… forgot, a couple of times.” Now, they duck their head as well, and even if they cut their hair shorter than they’d wanted, it’s still long enough to completely shield their face from view when it falls over it. “She… Yeah, that didn’t go over well. Once we started going places together, she’d go through my things before we left. Said we couldn’t take any chances, said I needed to be more careful or I was gonna get myself killed, and maybe her, too.” They reach out, touch a spot on the back of their head, a spot Jon thinks _might_ have a scar on it, and if it does, he… “Wonder if she meant something by that,” and the bitterness dripping from their voice is so caustic Jon half-expects to see little wisps of smoke billow up from the carpet directly below their head.

Jon stares at the top of their ducked head. He’d like to will Gerry to look up, to look at him properly, but he doesn’t think he can do that—he’s got to use his _words_ , and he’s not certain he can do anything more than make people say things they didn’t intend to say, anyways (Doesn’t want to test it, not now, not on Gerry).

“You know,” Gerry says suddenly, still staring down at the floor. They don’t sound bitter so much as they just sound… tired, maybe? The bitterness has run into tiredness, and won’t come back from it. “Gertrude hated it when I went through her stuff. Just remembering that now, how much she hated it when I even touched her suitcase. She wouldn’t even let me get it down off of the baggage… thing for her. ‘Course, she didn’t like it when anybody _else_ touched her stuff, either. Just… funny,” though their tone certainly doesn’t _sound_ like they think it’s funny.

Jon finds himself fisting his hands in the puffy duvet of his bed, only to relinquish the grip his burn-scarred hand has on the fabric when it starts to twinge again. “What… what do you want me to do, Gerry?” he asks them quietly.

He expected a prompt answer, but instead, though Gerry does lift their head up at that, they don’t answer him right away. Instead, they blink rapidly, head tilted to one side as if in confusion. The way their mouth twists a moment afterwards, yeah, definitely confusion, and Jon has absolutely _no_ desire to dwell on why.

At length, Gerry says slowly, “I… I don’t think I want you going through my stuff. Sketchbooks are a bit delicate; you could mess them up if you’re not careful.” That can’t possibly be the only reason, but it is a _reason_. “But…” They smile weakly. “If you’re curious about something, you can ask me. Trust me, I _know_ ‘curious.’ Whole reason I was going through her desk was because I was convinced she had something interesting in there. I mean, she was the _Archivist_ , and she’d been the Archivist for about fifty years by the time I met her. She had to have some seriously weird stuff on her.” Suddenly, they ask, “Have you got anything like that in your desk?”

Jon thinks of the lighter he’s been carrying around, the lighter Gerry homed in on the moment he pulled it out in the hotel room early this morning, the lighter he kept in his desk for an unreasonably long time. “Honestly, anything really interesting to you is probably going to be in Artifact Storage.” But he doesn’t think he can stand the idea of Gerry going in there alone, any more than he can stand the idea of any of them going in there alone, not after the table, not after what happened to Sasha. (Martin had thought they should have gotten rid of the table as soon as they both had some idea of what it was—no, not even then, just when they’d had some idea of where it had _come_ from. Jon wishes… He doesn’t think there’s been a single day gone by since he… since he found out, that he hasn’t wished he’d listened. That he and Martin had just hauled the table to a bridge somewhere and tossed it into the Thames. But it’s too late for that, now.)

“Figures.” Gerry snorts. “Gotta keep all the really weird shit in the same place, so long as none of it interacts with each other. Easier to keep track of it, that way.”

“I suppose.”

Jon will leave his questions regarding what he thinks he saw in the bag for another day. They’ll burn inside of him until then, he knows, will burn hotter and hotter with each hour that goes by that he doesn’t ask them, but he thinks he can handle it. He thinks. He likes to think so, anyways.

As for the bag, Gerry drops it, alongside all of the Walmart bags, down on the floor. They take the Walmart bag they had taken into the bathroom out of it. Through the translucent plastic, Jon can see their old, worn clothes, and the ragged braid they cut from their head. Gerry mutters something about needing to burn the hair, about how there are some people who can do terrible things with your hair if they get their hands on it. Another question that’s going to burn inside of Jon until he asks it, but he doesn’t have the energy for it, right now.

Soon, the only thing left over is the new sketchbook Gerry bought at Walmart, along with a couple of the pens from the pack they bought there as well. Gerry starts to sketch, and Jon, who completely forgot to bring any puzzle books or his laptop on this trip with him, just sort of stares up at the ceiling. The only thing he’s really got with him that he could be doing is the statements, and he honestly thinks he likes it better when there’s no one around listening to him record them. Gerry’s… probably heard Gertrude record a few. They’re probably not new to this. Jon would still rather not have anybody listening while he records. It’s just… It’s too private for that.

A couple more days, and he might start to… God, the withdrawal ( _God_ , it _was_ withdrawal, wasn’t it?) had felt worse than any time he’d ever quit smoking. Maybe talking to Trevor and Julia was enough, maybe talking to Gerry earlier today was enough. Jon hopes so. The last thing he wants is to trigger that again.

Gerry spends a few minutes sketching, and Jon just finds himself watching Gerry sketch. It’s, it’s not the worst way to pass the time. Gerry’s face is locked in an expression of intense concentration as they sketch whatever it is that they’re drawing, but at the same time, there’s something so remarkably relaxed about their expression and their posture, a sort of relaxation Jon hasn’t seen out of them even once today, and it’s not, not bad to see. It’s pretty nice, actually.

“Hey.” Gerry’s already soft voice is made softer still by abstraction. Their eyes never lift from the page of the sketchbook they’re drawing on as they half-mumble, “There’s something I meant to ask you.”

Jon blinks, drawn out of his… well, to be honest, they felt a little like daydreams. “What’s that?”

“How’d you know about me?” They’re still sketching, still gently inking the page, though their voice is stronger now, the mumble giving way to curiosity. “I mean, how’d you know enough about me to come looking? Doesn’t seem likely Gertrude thought I was important enough to leave notes about.” A cloud passes over their face. “If I’d been that important, she wouldn’t have ditched me in the hospital.”

And now, they’ve come to it. Now that they have come to it, the whole thing feels profoundly awkward, but Gerry’s going to find out sooner or later, especially if they wind up living in his flat with him for any length of time—somehow, Jon can picture all too easily Gerry trailing after him all the way to work, and then poking around in every last thing they can find. It would probably annoy Elias to no end. That's a comforting thought.

Well, might as well make certain that Gerry’s comfortable enough to go poking around the moment they set foot in the Institute, instead of trying to settle themselves after some sort of unsettling revelation. Jon scratches at his arm, trying and failing to pull a smile onto his face that would look encouraging, rather than apologetic. “You… you feature in a lot of the more recent statements people have given to the Magnus Institute, actually. Including the one I got from you this morning, I think I’ve recorded about half a dozen, so far?” And there are more buried away in the Archives. Ones Jon’s been meaning to record and hasn’t had the time for, and those he hasn’t found yet, but is certain are there.

At that, Gerry puts their sketchbook down on their bedside table. Their gaze drifts up to the ceiling, relaxation vanishing quickly from their body. Their mouth twists. “I’m not sure how I feel about that, actually.” Then, their gaze snaps to Jon’s face. “What did they say about me?”

Jon lets a noise that doesn’t quite pass for a laugh slip out of his mouth. “Besides the uncalled-for comments regarding your hair?”

Gerry rolls their eyes. “Besides that, yes.” They shrink a little, then, though part of that could be due to them sinking a little deeper onto the bed, head pressed to the pillow, but still looking at Jon, always looking at Jon. From this vantage point, Jon can see the tattoos on Gerry’s right hand and arm easily, and honestly, it feels as though they’re looking at him, too. “You know…” They pull their arms and shoulders in a little tighter against the rest of their body. “I didn’t think most of the people I’ve run into would be in a state to go talk about what happened to them with _anybody_.”

“You’d…” An image of a man setting himself on fire sears in Jon’s mind. Then, he sees Jane Prentiss as she must have looked just before she plunged her arm into the ‘wasp’s nest’ in her attic—thin and gaunt and hunched. Then, he remembers Helen. “You’d be surprised by who will show up, just to talk about what they’ve experienced with someone else.”

Gerry grimaces, staring down at their hands. “Maybe, maybe not. But seriously, what did they say about me?” They fiddle with their right hand like they’re trying to tap with one of the pens they just set down on their bedside table. “I never really thought anybody I ran into would really think much about me once we parted ways.”

Given how memorable Jon has found Gerry, he finds that a little hard to believe, but then, your mileage may vary, and Jon thinks he might be a bit biased. He tries to think of something to say that won’t come off as at least mildly off-putting, and eventually settles on, “Many of them came to the conclusion that you were weird, but helpful.”

A child taking a hammer to a brick wall flashes through his mind. A child still trying to reach for something they don’t yet understand can never be theirs, for it doesn’t exist. Jon puts the child away. The child he was in a world before that picture book, and the, the _spider_ no longer exists. Safe to say that the child who took a hammer to a brick wall no longer exists, either. Better to let them rest in oblivion than try to resurrect them, when their resurrection would only cause problems.

“Sounds about right.” Now, their hands are still, and they’re staring up at the ceiling, but Jon can see just enough of their face to see the self-sardonic smile playing on their lips. “Most of them did look at me like I crawled out of a gutter to get to them.” After a pause, “’Course, sometimes I _had_ been in a gutter, but that was usually because somebody else put me there.”

“One of them thought you were looking at her like you fancied her,” is out of Jon’s mouth before he quite knows what he’s saying.

Gerry lifts their head from their pillow by a couple of inches, staring at Jon like he’s suddenly broken into gibberish. “ _What_? Who the hell was thinking _that_?”

And at that, Jon, who’s come far enough that he can hardly just stop now, shrugs his shoulders. “Does ‘Andrea Nunis’ ring a bell to you?”

Gerry props themselves up on their shoulders, far enough that they can shake their head without risking just falling back down onto their back. “Not a single one. Keep in mind, I never did learn most of their names. Seemed safer to know less about them. The less I knew about them, the less likely the Beholding would get interested in them, too—wasn’t enough for some of them, though,” Gerry mutters. They click their tongue, face screwing up. “Who was she? I don’t remember thinking any of them were all _that_ good-looking.”

‘Someone you helped save from being killed or suffering a fate worse than death’ doesn’t sound like it would narrow things down very much. It sounds like Gerry’s done a lot of that, over the years. (It had been so reassuring to Jon, the idea that someone could be up to their neck or higher in all of _this_ , and still have the will and the drive to do something like that.) Jon roots around in his mind for a few moments, trying to reach for something that could narrow it down, before settling on “It was in Genoa, a few years back.”

For a long time, there comes no answer, and Jon starts to wonder just how long Gerry was in Genoa and just what it was they were even _doing_ there, that this wouldn’t be enough to narrow it down for them, that enough might have happened with them while they were in Genoa that to say that they encountered Andrea Nunis in Genoa, and that’s not enough to narrow it down to any one person for them. That would be an interesting story, Jon thinks, and bites his tongue to keep from asking after it _right now_.

But soon, there’s another thing keeping him from asking after it right now.

Jon had thought that Gerry’s silence stemmed from confusion, from obliviousness. Gerry’s the sort of person who’s had such a wildly eventful life that he had even thought it _likely_ that ‘Andrea Nunis’ and ‘Genoa’, when put together, wouldn’t narrow things down enough for Gerry to realize just who Andrea Nunis _is_. As the moments of silence drag on, if that silence grows heavier and harsher and more and more oppressive, it becomes clear to Jon that confusion has absolutely _nothing_ to do with it.

Gerry’s staring at him, and won’t stop. Eventually, they seem to decide that staring at him while lying on their back on the bed just isn’t enough for the intensity of the stare they’re going for, and they sit up on the edge of the bed, mirroring Jon’s own posture—back considerably more rigid, but shoulders squared and hands braced on the bed at their sides. Their eyes are open wide, shining bright, too-bright, like a light shone upon water. Their nostrils flare as they breathe in harshly from between gritted teeth. Fingers clutch at the duvet, crushing the fabric beneath.

“You mean…” Their voice sounds… off. Their voice sounds like nothing Jon has heard from them today, like nothing he ever expected to hear from them. It wavers, it crackles, it falters, it falls. And then, more words drag out, wrenched unsteadily from their mouth like teeth yanked from an unwilling mouth, pitching so high at the end that really, the people in the surrounding rooms _must_ be able to hear: “She’s still _alive_?”

Jon stares at Gerry, and Gerry stares right back, breathing growing more and more uneven with each second that passes, more uneven and more _wet_ , and Jon stares helplessly back, uncertain and uneasy and starting to wonder just what sort of landmine he’s just tossed Gerry onto. “Erm…” He’s faltering himself, now, the way he’s found himself faltering in the past when he’s made such a massive misstep without realizing what he was doing until the misstep has sent him tumbling down the stairs. “Yes. She came into the Archives to give a statement around 2010, I think. When I checked, she was still traveling, too, though I think she’s—“

The tremble in Gerry’s voice has spread to their entire body. Teeth gritted no longer, the wet, ragged gasps jarring from their mouth have taken on a sound like a— “You mean that actually _worked_?!” they demand, voice pitching so far towards hysterical that it soon vaults straight over the boundary.

Jon tries to say something else. His eyes dart all over the room as he tries to think of something else to _say_ , but all possible words die in his throat when he looks back at Gerry’s face.

When Gerry stepped out of the bathroom, their face was completely dry. They’d dried off pretty thoroughly after they’d gotten out of the shower, and there was no trace of the bathwater anywhere on their skin. If not for the fact that they came out of the bathroom completely clean, it would have been easy to assume that they’d never gotten a shower at all.

Their face had been completely dry.

It’s not dry, now.

Gerry’s still staring at him, staring at him like they don’t even know what’s going to happen if they take their eyes off of him. They stare at him, but the eyes don’t really seem to _see_. The eyes are bright, bright, too-bright, wet, streaming, quickly turning bloodshot, sure to turn swollen.

Jon freezes, still and silent, swallowing down a thick breath of his own as Gerry wraps their arms about their sides, swallows down several thick, sobbing breaths in quick succession, tears still streaming down their thin face.

He can’t… He can’t remember the last time. No matter how what they’ve experienced has affected them, somehow, _somehow_ , everyone who ever comes to give a statement in person manages to hold the strongest of their reactions in for as long as it takes them to give the statement itself. Somehow, for as long as they’re telling the story, they’re calm, and if they need to cry after they’ve given the statement, they don’t start crying until they’re out of Jon’s sight and hearing.

He’s not good at this. He’s never been good at this. There have been times when that knowledge has been enough to keep him from trying, when it’s been enough to keep him rooted to the ground, but it doesn’t feel good, it’s _never_ felt good, and he can’t, he just can’t—

When Jon gets up, it’s not an automatic response. He knows what he’s doing the whole time. As he crosses the short distance between the two beds, Gerry looks up in frank alarm, manages to choke out a quick, defensive, “I’m alright!”

“You’re _not_ ,” Jon protests, but he stops short for just a moment. Gerry’s holding their right hand out like they’ll try and shove him away if he comes any closer to them.

He doesn’t go straight. He goes sideways a bit, instead, and sits down on the bed beside them. The mattress shakes slightly as Gerry struggles to hold in the sobs they bite back just before they can escape through their mouth. They fold in on themselves, hunched over, wrapping their arms even tighter around their sides than before, lips curled back from their teeth, eyes streaming.

Jon puts a ginger hand on Gerry’s trembling back, wincing at how easy it is to discern bone, even through layers of fabric and skin and flesh. His own back has felt that way, sometimes, he knows, even though he’s always been careful not to touch it when it does; the feeling always makes his skin crawl, always makes his gorge rise high in his throat. He hadn’t expected—but it’s what’s playing out right in front of him, and he can’t watch without feeling sick.

Ginger at first, but when Gerry doesn’t flinch away, he sets his hand more firmly between their hard, bony shoulders. Slowly, so slowly, Gerry looks up at him. They don’t say anything; Jon’s not even certain they’re _capable_ , at the moment. Tears drip from the tip of their long, sharp nose; tears drip from their long, pale eyelashes. For a moment, they look like they’re about to ask something, but the moment passes, and the only sound that comes is the hiss of sobbing breaths still murdered quickly before they can escape through their mouth.

He’s not good at this.

He’s really not.

He’ll try, anyways.

Jon tries tentatively to put his arms around Gerry’s shoulders, pausing when Gerry stiffens once more, teeth gritted, but at length, Gerry nods choppily, and Jon pulls them forward. They sit there in silence for what feels like an eternity, the only break in the strange, charged stillness when Gerry unfolds their arms from their sides and digs their hands into his back, clutching at him like he might disappear if they ever let go. It’s the sort of desperation that infects all it touches, and Jon has to swallow down hard to keep it from sticking to the walls of his throat. He can feel a dampness spreading through his shirt, clammy against his skin. Gerry’s thick, coarse hair brushes against Jon’s cheek. It feels wet.

“I thought…” When Gerry finally speaks again, their voice is hoarse and cracked, a voice that both sounds like it belongs to another person entirely, and sounds more like themselves than anything else Jon has heard. “I really thought she was dead.” There’s some push for emotion to seep into their voice, but exhaustion wins the day and it’s just dull, so dull. “I thought about her every day for months. I should have followed her out of the coffee shop, I should have talked to her more, I should have tried harder.” Another choked-off sob. “I didn’t think… I really didn’t…” High and thin and strained, “When does _that_ ever work?”

“Apparently,” Jon says dryly, because he doesn’t know what else he’s supposed to do when he’s got Gerry still crying on his shoulder like this, “there is something to be said for the power of love after all.”

A rough jitter that could have been a laugh if it didn’t sound so much like a sob. Gerry digs their fingernails deeper into Jon’s skin, sending pinpricks of pain shooting up and down Jon’s already sore back. “You’re a sap.”

Jon rolled his eyes. “You suggested it. What does that make _you_?”

“A bigger sap,” Gerry agrees, and does not let go.


End file.
